Sorry for my english.
>Index values have a maximum length of 240 characters (if a CDX is used, 100 if >not) so it won't really help you to index on a subset of the memo field if the >product numbers aren't contained within an area spanning that many characters.
It is a free table (I mean no CDX can be used). Index memo field is not really possible.
>You are probably going to have to implement a full-text querying engine (e.g. >PHDbase) or use $ or AT() in your queries (making them very slow).
Use of VFP fonctions in SQL (like $, AT(), MLine()) will be very slow like you wrote above. May be the full-text engine could be interested.
>This may seem academic at this point but do the product numbers have to be >stored in a memo field? If they were in a child table, the product numbers >could be simple text fields that could be queried. Why the memo field approach?
I did not design the database model. I have to work with that model...