Hi!

There is an option for connection string, though this will return you all records that marked for deleting, that might be not a good thing for you when there are a lot of them. Better index table - just add a tag with any name and "deleted()" expression. When you query data through network, though, this can sometimes slow down the query because transferring the indexes file through network. So do accurate testing of it. There were a lot of discussions here about this fact.

As about partial optimization because SET DELETED is ON - just ignore it. For testing a query to see if it is optimized just set DELETED OFF temporarily.

>Yes, it definitely helps. Thanks. One thing I am not sure how to do is SET DELETED OFF using the OLEDB provider. I'm doing some VBScript/ADO/OLEDB with the VFP7OLEDB driver and using ADO's GetRows() method to get the data from the table and need all the speed I can get. :)
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>Do you know how to specify SET DELETED OFF or "ignore deleted records" using the OLEDB provider?
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>Thanks.
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>>You can receive partical optimization because SET DELETED is ON and you do not have index on DELETED() in your table. SET DELETED OFF and you will see.
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>>GROUP BY is not optimizable at all because it uses the result of query for it instead of source tables with indexes. COUNT(*) and all other aggregate functions - the same. Maybe SQL Server have better logic for this - I do not know, in VFP for sure optimizable parts are only JOIN and WHERE conditions. Well, to sort and group VFP might decide to make a temporary index or similar...
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>>HTH.