Hi Jim,
Thanks for your input! You've got a good point. Actually, I don't do an ORDER BY, because I add several index tags to the result cursor afterwards- but don't worry, I'm not concerned about the speed that the indexing takes.

Mark

>Since you don't mention "ORDER BY" but you do say that the results are for reporting purposes, let me assume that there is such a clause in your SELECT.
>
>This may sound silly, but I suspect that removing any order by and doing that in a subsequent select *could* speed things up. My guess is that an ORDER BY in either will have roughly the same effect but that a ORDER BY in a fresh SELECT just might start things with a "cleaner" RAM situation.