Yau,

I suspect it's a linear function, more related to total column widths than to the number of columns. 30 integer columns will be faster to read/write then 30 char(50) columns. 15-30 columns in a table is easily handled by VFP.

I would not split a table into two for this reason. Making read/writes into two tables is absolutely going to be slower than one table.

The only time you should go through this effort is when you are getting close to the two gigabyte file size limit on a table.

If you have some slow running queries we can probably help show you how to optimize them.

>Is there any relation between the number of columns in a table and the relative read write speed of a particular table? i.e would a table with more columns be slower by a fixed ratio compared to a table with less columns.
>Is there a threshold where its better to split the information into 2 tables or more tables instead of having one large file?
>I'm looking at this aspect to see if data retrieval of tables with many columns (15-30 columns) can be sped up.