> >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.