Lose distinct!

Index on deleted() even if none are. Index on every column sepeciall if this is your trasnaction table.

What type of sever is this running on? NT or Novel? What type of ram and what is your bandwidth?

I think that you need to slice and dice your data better. You want top 500 people over 2 years or to 1000 the past 6 months.

Select player, count(playid) as hands, gamedate from play group by 1,3

That will total up everyting. TOO MUCH INFO. Try:

Select player, count(playid) as hands, gamedate ;
from play ;
where gamedate between mdate1 and mdate2 ;
group by 1,3 ;
having hands >=25

This way you can see play only within a scope of a week, month, quarter, holiday season. You only see people who have a minimum of plays that you set.

Have you thought of SQL SERVER? This is the volume that should not be dragged through the network but be crunced by the database, on that server.

What is the size in MEGS for your CDX file? 20 meg, 50? Just passing that through the network is slow.


>>Hi,
>>
>>I've ot a 15.6 million row table (play.dbf) - (only 16 small columns) - that I need to do some data analysis on. Problem is that some aggregate functions drive VFP to an absolute standstill - not just slow - but down to nothing! I need help with a strategy to deal with this.