>Thanks for the suggestions. I'll experiment with it although I'm afraid that the eventual SELECT that matches records from the original table with the ID's of the matching records will slow things down. I'll let you know how I make out.

Creating a view forces you to do things in a single SQL statement. If this can be avoided, you can always select from dictionary into a cursor first, and then join your table with this cursor. This would give you speed, because the thing which may slow SQL down is a join of two long tables.