>I'm accessing a database that's actually being used by another program written in FoxPro. My access is read only, no writing is being done, but here's the fun part:- I made a copy of the database to my personal directory on the network to test with while I was programming...I made my SELECT statements, optimized the statements, and it pulled the data quickly...however, when I got done and pointed the program to use the actual database that is used company wide, suddenly all my optimization isn't doing any good...or something, because now a search for a single part number takes 10 seconds instead of 1. It was that much of a perfomance drop...has anyone had any kind of experience with this sort of thing? Any advice?

There is one trick in trying ad-hoc Select-SQL queries. If you want to get trustworthy bench testing then you should restart VFP after each query. If you do not do it, then VFP (sophisticated enough) just use temp indexes it may create during the previous run, i.e. next query might be much faster then previous one.