The check on _tally is only to find out if the record in Oracle already exists. Table pers is an open remote view, single table, ordered by sequence. If _tally = 0, then I need to insert into pers the values from old_data, plus the foriegn keys that turn flat old_data into normalised pers. For each record in old_data, there are 12 selects that find the foriegn keys. (Don't you just love fixing an amatuers db design :-( ). I have in the mean time, proved that much of the problem slowness is the server (AST Manhattan) but streamlining the code is still very desirable. Just a note, this project would have been finished (beta) a month ago if it had stayed in VFP!