Hi Jos

>Tamar, you are right, the hdd light flashes continualy when the process is slow.

>MY) I believe it would be far better to do one table at a time.
>
>Mike, I cannot do a straight APPEND FROM becuase I omitted to say that sometimes existing records will need to be updated rather than only appending new records to the table. I need to check the values of the array records and depending on certai conditions either update an existing record (which requires a SEEK) or append a new record.

I was attempting to show how you could use SQL to extract new data into one cursor and revision data to another cursor. It would mean processing each table in turn. It would also mean you could also make the routine...

select new records for condition to new record cursor

select revising records for condition to revise record cursor

call a single "add new records" routine pass new record cursor name

call a single "revise records" routine pass revise record cursor name

repeat for other tables.