>Hi,
> Thank you for your reply.
>
>>>This seems quite bad. How large is the table (MB) ? Which indexes did you use ? When retrieving the 5000 records which indexes are used to optimize ? Did you try setting optimization off ?
>
>The table size is 2MB ++. I am using index ALLTRIM(card_no) and i use it in my SQL statement too.
>I will tried to set optimization off later. Why need to set it off?
>
>>>4 seconds, for 5000 records is not that bad, however 1-2 minutes on a 10BASET is bad, very bad. How is network trafic ?
>The network is totally free.

John,

I would not recommend to use alltrim function in index expression. Use just Card_no as an index, not Alltrim. If you want partial string compare, you can use SET EXACT OFF and SET ANSI OFF (for VFP tables).