That is quite dramatic! I think my query may be at least 20 times faster now, too...and I haven't even made sure it is properly optimized yet (notice, I did not say fully *grin*)

>>Hello Hilmar,
>>
>>That is what I finally did...see my reply (in this thread) to Sergey where I showed how I broke it down.
>
>I will never forget one particular query (ca. 9 tables) that took 50 seconds over the network. Partitioning it into several queries reduced the query time to 2 seconds.
>
>Hilmar.