VFP won't necessarily create a temp index. That will only happen if Rushmore thinks one will speed things up. I've seen times when the engine was wrong in selecting the order for joins (although extremely rare). That's exactly why the FORCE clause was added to the SQL SELECT command. From VFP Help (emphasis mine):

"FORCE specifies that tables are joined in the order in which they appear in the FROM clause. If FORCE is omitted, Visual FoxPro attempts to optimize the query. However, the query might be executed faster by including the FORCE keyword to disable the Visual FoxPro query optimization."


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>Huh, what's the connection there? Each join will be optimized, using either existing indexes or temp indexes created on the fly. If no outer joins are involved, the engine will determine the best order to join the tables for optimization. (That happens with outer joins, too, to some extent, but outer joins limit the changes in order that can be made.)
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>Tamar