Hi Nadya,

>SET ANSI OFF
>select ... from ... where cl_name ="GREE" and cf_name = "MAR" and cM_Initial = ""

>or I can use

>lcName = padr("GREE",25,"_") + padr("MAR",20,"_")+padr("",1,"_")
>select ... from ... where cl_name + cf_name + cm_Initial LIKE lcName

First off: I believe if you set ansi off, the results should be different, so any comparison might be unfair just on the number of returned values for index expressions and the resulting data set - but I am a bit blurry at the moment from not enough sleep<g>.

select ... from ... where cl_name =="GREE" and cf_name == "MAR" and cM_Initial == ""

should be equal to

lcName = padr("GREE",25,"_") + padr("MAR",20,"_")+padr("",1,"_")
select ... from ... where cl_name + cf_name + cm_Initial == m.lcName

If your table is non-trivial, always include the MDot: it gets searched for every record.
For measuring "targeted" speed differences I'ld recommend putting the table and index onto another computer with a bottleneck connection: either use an old 10 MBit hub or serial connection to simulate a busy LAN - Probably then the second version will be faster if the table has many records. If speed is of utmost importance for this, also try out seek / scan while.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas