Elgin,

>SELECT *;
> FROM dga;
> WHERE Dga.custid = ?lcCustid
>
>and I find that it still takes nearly a minute to retrieve the records I need. Do I want to do some kind of indexing on these tables? Can I do that without changing the format of the tables? They have to stay in their DOS format as there is still a DOS application being used to update and maintain these tables.

You will want an index on custid in your dba table, but if you need to maintain backward compatibility with Foxpro 2.6, you should create the index tag in Fox 2.6, using

INDEX ON custid TAG custid

.

If you have no 2.6 apps that need to read the files in that format, you can create the index tags in VFP, but that will make them unreadable in 2.6. As long as you create the index tags in 2.6, VFP can read and update them, and your view should populate *much* faster.