I think it was George Goley that once said, "a smart programmer can always beat Rushmore".

You know more about your data than VFP & Rushmore ever can. I had an experience several months ago where I was attempting to create a dozen tables all involving fairly complex calculations and a six way join. After running the first table, I realized it would take 6 hours to complete. (biggest source table was over 8 million records). Needing to get home to dinner, I decided to break the process down into three separate steps:

1. creating interim tables with only key values (via SQL select);
2. set relation and copy data to secondary temp tables; and
3. create final results from secondary tables (via SQL select).

I figured I would cut the processing time from 6 hours down to 20-40 minutes. I was amazed to discover that the whole process ran in 3 seconds! At first, I thought I had done something wrong. But no, the Fox really is that fast when you help it along.

>If someone had similar experience, I'd like to shed some light on the issue. What I'd like to know is whether this is a general rule, or it has its ups and downs, or was I just plain lucky in these cases.