>James,
>
>>High all!
>
>Tsk, tsk.... what a freudian slip for a police officer. *L*
>
>VFP isn't going to be able to use the index to support the substring search like this. It could only use it to find records that start with the sequence. Is the SELECT ... LIKE "%C234%" really too slow?
>
>Do you have some freedom with the table? Or maybe the ability to create a new one specifically to support this query?

how would you recommend altering the table to support this query ?