Hi Jim,

>It really does have me wondering how so many people could have reported 'now running nice and fast, as expected' (over several years now) once told to try an index on DELETED() and doing so [because I am willing to bet that the vast majority of tables have only a very small percentage of deleted records].

For example, a number people used the COUNT command to detect empty tables and display a message in that case, we didn't worked on views where we could use _TALLY or RECCOUNT(). A number of people recycled records, again pretty slow without an index on deleted. We used BROWSE wich is rushmore aware and was remarkable faster with an index.

Now we have SELECT statements and views, we work on buffered table and use views. To display data we use a grid, which is slow no matter whether you have an index or not. And many application don't recycle records, because in order to append a record with optimistic table buffering, it's easier to simply append blank, otherwise you would have to deal with a lot of multi-user conflicts.

Christof