Hi John

You last test excluded seek. Locate and SQL are both intended to work with sets of records (continue depends on locate). That's why both commands use Rushmore optimization. Seek uses a binary search algorithm. Its going to be fastest. I doubt it will require the entire tag's data to be pulled across the wire. Even if the record is physically "far", seek will identify the record first and move there. Locate/SQL will examine the entire tag, then identify the first record and move there.

The addition of a filter to the table in question prior to the seek will muddy the situation considerably.

HTH
Mike