>>My user will never delete more than 5% of records: they enter
>>invoices, customers, goods and packing runs periodically, largest
>>tables are 250000 records, 30 MB
>>
>>Do you agree that in this case index on deleted() will decrease the speed of queries?
>
>No, I wouldn't say that...it just might not increase the speed much...
>It's supposed to be more dependent on size than # of deleted's. I don't believe that's a large enough table for the deleted index to make a lot of difference in SQL, but were I you, I might test a little to compare the results, if you haven't done it yet...besides we're all curious about it, now :)

Fearless forecast: you fill find that some (not all) queries will be faster without Deleted() tags and, 'incidentally', SEEK/SKIP will be even faster, but for these particular queries only. However, while we may toggle our query methodology, we cannot toggle with tags in real application.