Hi Mike,

>Hi Jim,
>
>I have tried it without the NOFILTER clause without much change in speed. Removing this clause is sometimes dramatically faster since it uses a filter on an existing base table instead of building a new result set.
>
>As for the Fox and SQL data engines, they are dramatically different, though they generally produce the same results if you use ANSI syntax. What appears to be happening in Fox is that it builds the entire result set and then returns only the top x records. In this case, the entire result set can be over 500MB. SQL is quite a bit faster, it *appears* to determine the top x records prior to writing a result set. In this case, everything it needs to determine the top x records is contained in the index.
>
I know that SQL Server is dramatically different, and there are nice things about it that I wish we had here from a straight SQL point of view.

I 'knew' that VFP (seemed to) get the entire result set before presenting the TOP n, but assumed that SQL Server would have to too.
I think it still would IF the field in question was not an indexed field.
I guess there's hope that VFP7 also uses the index data to make the determination when it can. After all SP3 or SP4 of VS6 changed how fast a REINDEX is done, with no fanfare.

Cheers