Hi!

I made exactly similar thing in one of my applications - interactive search for SQL Server. I used 2 approaches that helped me to improve performance greatly:

1. Try following query:

cSurNameSearch = "XXXX"
strSQL = "SELECT TOP 10 PK, SurName FROM Person WHERE SurName >= '" + cSurNameSearch + "' AND SurName<'" + cSurNameSearch + "zzzzzzzzzzzzz' ORDER BY SurName"

The above query is pretty optimizable. Instead of "z" you can use also some other character you know for sure it is the last character in character code table from a set of characters that could be used in search.

2. To improve performance by do not making queries roundtrips for each character, make a timeout for query. User types in "Man" - no query fo "M" and "a". After user types "n", and wait 0.5 seconds, query is launched. If it does nto reqturn what is needed, user starts to type further, when stop for a moment query launch again. The delay between last character typing and query is determined usually by the speed of the query - of query is slow, dleay is larger. In general, I would not make it greater than 1.5 seconds.

HTH.