>I concede that the inner join and union is the most elegant, but I have found Visual FoxPro to be just too slow for large (or even just networked) record sets. What's worse, sometimes my users don't have the system resources I have, so the query won't even complete for them. So, I often try splitting the union into cursors, and then joining the cursors. The result is the same, but it may be much faster. Try this:

VFP optimizations for ordering the JOINs is does not always makes the right desicion - because it does not have enough knowlegde on the data
and the expected results of each join - which you as a programmer has

in previous versions of VFP and FP it was indeed faster at time to break a SELECT statement inorder to ensure the optimal join sequence
in VFP5 MS added the FORCE clause which let you do the same in a single
SELECT

Arnon