>3-18 hours for reports (even on a mainframe) can be acceptable depending on the queries you are performing. I've had 12-20 hour queries before. Huge datasets performing numerous joins.
>
>But working with 200,000 records and waiting for 5-20 minutes in Visual Basic is ridiculous considering regular databases perform those type of queries in a minute.

This is the type of input I am looking for. What kind of times make you go "that's ridiculous". On an "average" machine, an "average network" when does it become "too long"?