>>>Although, in almost every situation, SQL commands will be faster than going through a do while loop....
>>>
>>
>>Not true...SQL commands are not necessarily faster. It depends on;
>>
>>1) The amount of data
>>2) Proper indexing
>>3) Amount of virtual memory on the PC
>>4) How the SQL statement is structured
>>
>>At a previous job, I had an 11,000,000 record table. SQL came to
>>a CRAWL when using this table. SEEK and SCAN were *MUCH* faster.
>
>Okay, granted, your design has to be sound (ie. indexing) and the SQL statement has to be optimized...and it depends what you are trying to do...but, I haven't found too many cases where an **optimized** SQL statement has been noticably slower than SEEK and SCAN...I haven't worked with 11,000,000 record tables (at least not in FoxPro), so I can't really comment on that situation...
>
>Joe
The main thing is not even number of records in a table, but how many records will be retrieved by Select-SQL. Seek will be also more relevant for the case of soft search (SET NEAR ON).
Edward Pikman
Independent Consultant