Hi, Mike

I'm not sure what you mean by the memory. This is a dedicated machine running nothing but NT Server & SQL Server, and I am the only user connected to it. The table is a new import, and after running DBCC SHOWCONTIG, it shows a Scan Density of 99.98%, so there is no real fragmentation. I just now tried putting the field into a table of its own (a one-field table), with a clustered index on the field, and the results were the same. I know that SQL Server has many other advantages over file server, but I can't believe the performance would be so much less. I just feel that since I'm new to this, I must be missing something.
Mark

>It could be one or a combination of many things. How much memory can SQL Server access? Are there other services (like Exchange) running on the machine? Is the table severly fragmented? If you run QA on another computer, do you get the same results? And finally, we people evaluate moving to SQL Server, performance is rarely one of the considerations <s>.