Arnon, that's a good idea, except that I deleted the indexes and re-created them from scratch as well as simply running 'reindex', and the PACKed version stayed slow.

Thanks,
Barbara

>it probably has to do with the fact that when you ZAPed the tables the
>INDEXes were zapped as well and
>thus when you appended theywe created from scratch (which doesn't happen
>when you PACK)
>
>Arnon

>>Hi all,
>>
>>Today I deleted 25,000 records from a 30,000 record table, and packed it.
>>A SQL (40 records) which had been taking <1 sec. now took 15 sec.
>>:-(((
>>So, I:
>>
>>a. reindexed. Still slow
>>
>>b. re-packed Still slow
>>
>>c. checked every clause in the SQL and matched them with indexes. Still
>>slow
>>
>>d. Restored the original. Speed was fine. :-))
>>
>>e. Deleted, speed was fine. :-)
>>
>>f. Packed - slow again :-((
>>
>>g. Copied data (5K records) to a temp file, ZAPped and appended.
>>
>>Speed is now terrific - almost too fast to see. :-)
>>
>>Question: Why did this happen?
>>
>>TIA
>>Barbara
>>
>>