If you look at my Foxpro Advisor articles you'll see that there's more overhead to Rushmore than that. Rushmore not only has to examine the index expressions to determine which one(s) to use, it also has to examine each entry in the index to build a bitmap. I call this the Rushmore Effect. Seek does a binary search (y>m, y>s, y>v, y>x) sequentially halving the distance to the right record. I argue that seek and its derivatives are for finding a single record ... one needle in a haystack. Locate and SQL are for grabbing sets of records. The trade off comes in subsequent accesses of the selected record set.