>I ran a series of identical queries and below are the results:
>
> With Deleted() Tag Avg of 24.4152 Seconds
>Without Deleted() Tag Avg of 16.5155 Seconds
>
>And yes set deleted is ON.
>
>Note: SYS(3054) Returns Full optimization on "With Deleted Tag"
> and Partial Optimization on "Without Deleted Tag".
>
>Go Figure!
Patrick,

That is strange. I just ran tests also, after reading your message and here's the results I got with SET DELETED ON and 107 deleted records in a table with 1,072,071 records. The select was a simple single table select and was done 5 times each with the times averaged;

Without tag on deleted(): 42.02 seconds
With tag on deleted(): 0.39 seconds

This is a very different result than you got. The machine these tests were run on is running WinNT 4.0 SP3, a P166 with 48MB of RAM, nothing else running, no network connection, adn also this was with VFP 5.0a with SP2 from VS applied.

My results show that no tag on deleted is approximately 107 times slower than with a deleted tag.