Myself and a fellow programmer came up with a decent way of comparing local and remote records without bringing many records over the network. We setup a user table with a date and time field intdicating the last time the local tables were updated. We added a date and time field to the remote records that will be updated when a record is changed or inserted. We select (sqlexec) for records greater than the local updated date. When we complete the update we update the local update date in the user table. Looks like this:

mrecs=sqlexec(mdbc,'select * from insurer where date_stamp > ;
?mdate_stamp','temp')

Then replace localtable.update_date with date() and localtable.time with time().

This seems to work great!