Andrew,
Why are the records being deleted? Are "batch" deletions necessary?
Can the deletions take place as part of a process that "renders" them delete-able?


>Terry,
>
>I know I can change it to Select first and then loop and delete one by one; and it does work faster that way.
>However, the question was, what makes it work slow in this particular scenario:
>1. It is networked table I delete from
>2. It is opened at least one more time by another VFP instance
>3. I do not issue FLOCK on it prior to DELETE
>4. It has nested SELECT or in some other way requires joining of the table being updated with an intermediate cursor in VFP 9
>
>Because it works fast as it is if
>1. It is local table to my machine
>2. I do FLOCK first or ensure that it is not opened by anybody else
>3. The command dos not involve nested Select
>
>I need to understand what syntax to avoid without running into these performance issues later. And I prefer using standard SQL because of portability issues.
>
>--Andrew