>What is the fastest way? From what I have seen, converting a cursor to ADO RS or XML is pretty slow.

Always looking for the quick fix.

As always it depends on a lot of things. Since you can't return a cursor directly it doens't much matter whether it's slow to return the data in another format, does it? You simply don't have a choice.

Given that you can start looking at your options:

* Pass data in a file and pass a pointer to the other application.

* Use ADO to run the query and return the data as ADO directly

* Run the query as normal and convert it to XML

* Run the query as normal and convert it into an encoded cursor

* Run the query as normal and convert into an ADO RS.

All of these are viable, but it depends on your application which will work best. A smart application that only passes small amounts of data over a dcom or internet connection will not notice a huge performance difference between approaches. But an app that sends everything to a client and back will definittely notice it.