Hi everyone,

I need to do a SELECT DISTINCT from a table with about 100,000 records to populate the top level nodes of a treeview control, with the user able to select different fields to populate the treeview with.

I have index tags on the fields that the user can specify and UPPER() of the same fields.

The following query takes about 36 seconds:

SELECT DISTINCT &lcField FROM DocsMast ;
   ORDER BY &lcField ;
   INTO CURSOR TreeInit

The following code runs in less than 1 second:

SELECT DISTINCT &lcField FROM DocsMast ;
  INTO CURSOR TreeInit

INDEX ON UPPER(&l_cField) TAG Sorted

Why? Is there a way to get the result ordered without having to do a manual INDEX or wait for 30+ seconds? I gather that VFP is applying the ORDER BY to the entire table before applying the DISTINCT clause.