Charlie,

>I don't know what the formula should be, but one of the variables should be the number of records that match and the percentage of those matching records which are deleted. However, Walter, I agree with all of your general conclusions concerning this issue.

>>- Perforance gain in seconds = Totaltime NONTAGGED query * deleterecords% * OverheadUsingDeletedTag(approx .60)

Well the OveadUsingDeletedTag constant is a constant I found with my experiments. Of course it can differ depending on system configuration, tablesize, network, etc. I don't think it is possible to create an excact formula for all circumstances, but I think I will use this as a guideline for future use.

However this constant will never be 1, because rushmore has to process the deleted() tag.

As for the number of records: I don't think it matters a lot. It's about the percentage of deleted records in a table rather than the exact number.

Walter,