> >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"?
My measure is factor of three - if I know I've seen a similar size of
tables, similar number of joins/selects from selects etc, and two cases
which fall into the same cathegory should not differ by more than a
factor of three (two should be the measure for a single-user machine,
but when was it last you saw one doing large data processing?).
I've seen these things happen, when I first used SQL in FP2.0 - a report
totalling some 90,000 records on a 386/33 came down to 25 seconds from
previous 3 minutes. So, any program which does sequential processing is
practically obsolete these days. You'd be surprised to see how many
programmers still use "do while !eof()... skip... enddo" on raw data.