Mark,

That's the trouble with having to rely on "emiprical observation" - I am afraid that you are wrong!

I have nothing more to go on that you do *except* that I have had experience that VFP still goes to the actual table EVEN IF the fields in question are ALL indexes.
I have *no* idea how this might effect the reporting of "full" vs "partial".

It would be so easy for the VFP folks to just tell us what they have designed it to do. But they don't tell us. Who knows why???

Cheers,
Jim N

>>I am trying to determine why my SQL statement is returning
>>'Partial' Optimization instead of full.
>>
>>SELECT Acctnum, DeptNum;
>> FROM Chg;
>> WHERE Chg.Acctnum='5555555';
>> INTO CURSOR cResult
>
>Patrick, in my experiments with this very issue, I have found that the optimization will be "partial" if any of the fields in the select statement are not in an index. In your example, AcctNum is indexed, but the query processor still has to go back to the main table to retrieve DeptNum. That's why the optimization is partial. If the entire query can be resolved by the contents of the index, then optimization will be "full".
>
>Like I said, this is my empirical observation only... I could certainly be wrong.