>>>>I see from later dialogue that you are ready to accept this as 'normal'.
>>>>I would say that you should be able to get better myself, and by much too.
>>>>Does a BROWSE take as long when you have set the index to bed and opened the BROWSE with the Key option (for your example below)?
>>>>I suppose that RAM could be implicated here -large indices may not be able to be efficiently loaded?
>>>
>>>The browse take 6 to 7 seconds (even with the method above). I have 64megs of RAM on a PII.
>>>
>>>Interesting note is that if I set a relation between this large table and a parent table and then choose record in the parent table... the child records are displayed instantaneously. This means that relations between tables are implemented are a more fundamental level than a SQL statement. Perhaps I can harness this concept in my query...
>>
>>Have you considered file fragmentation?
>
>Is this an issue on a Netware 4 server? I thought the thing defraged itself.

Not sure about NW4, as we use NT4, which does have to be defragged periodically.
We dumped NW for other reasons, mainly file corruption.

>
>P.S. I reindexed the table (takes 1/2 hour). The query is now down to 3 seconds. This is getting into the acceptable range.

Whatever is acceptable, but I've seen damn near instant returns on multi-million record tables...