Uwe,

> Please tell me about this locate thing. Are you talking about FB or
> what? (Delphi?)

locate is method that (almost) all db objects use to search data in
products that use the VCL dataset (me thinks), Delphi, BCB, JB and
others. I use Delphi for my apps. I thought (at a best case scenario)
that locate would have some call though the FB api and the engine
would do a search at the server level and return the pointer to the
record(s) that would satsify the search. I just couldn't discover if
the query data component jumped to this record or if it had to scroll
internally to the record and by this bring eveything by wire to the
station.

Seems that the later is happening, ugh.

> No, <like '%a'> cannot use an index.
> <like 'a%'> gets translated to "starting with" which will use an index.

Thanks a lot Uwe.
Andrew