>>And what about the RECALL ALL vs optimistic table buffering and TABLEREVERT()? That's where I expected to see a significant difference in performance.
>
>Er, I never got that far in testing, since the DELETE method was already known to be slower in total at that point than the NOT IN method...
>
>RECALL was *very* slow though, in the one time I applied it to recover the DELETEDs from the above testing...

No problem, Bruce - for the moment, I'll follow my instincts. I like the SQL approach much better IAC, especially if the data ever migrates to something other than VFP native tables.