>>The system I'm currently developing will eventually be using client-server data, but the initial implementation will be file-based. So it seemed like a perfect solution to use local views now, and 'switch' them to remote later. Except that the views are incredibly slow!
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>>The four tables take 3 seconds to open. Opening the four corresponding views (no joins, nodata, fully optimized) takes 20 seconds! (Subsequent requries are fast).
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>>It seems I'd be better off wihout the views, just use filter conditions on the main tables.
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>>Am I doing something obviously wrong? Is this the normal behavior of local views? If so, why would anyone make such a performance sacrifice to use them?
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>Are these just direct views of one table (SELECT * FROM...) or are they multitable views? Are you filtering your views using WHERE and are you sure they're fully optimized?

They're all direct views of one table, filtered on one field that's indexed in each base table. The view that's by far the slowest is based on a table that has 233 fields, record length of 1840, and 41,000 records. (The table _is_ fully normalized, and I need almost every field in my form).

I tried using all filtered tables instead of views, and found the form loaded faster but the child grids initialized slower.

So my approach now is that I'm not going to use that very slow view (it's not in a child grid), but will use the other three (they are in child grids).