Daniel

>>How many records are returned by this query?

2400

>>Which version of Firebird are you using?

1.5

>>Also, try the query without the ORDER BY clause, just to see if it's
>>not the PLAN SORT that is the bottleneck of your query.

Hmmm, you may be on to something there. 10 seconds now

Martijn

>Does adding this help:
>and orders.customerlink = c.link

Lucs query returns rows now, but it still takes 46 seconds

Helen

> And, after doing that, change the main search clause to:
> and (c.branchcode = 'SAN' OR 1=1)

The query took 15 minutes and totally maxed the server out

> (on the suspicion that you have a horrible long dup chain on that index)

Yes, the branchcode index has 54 distinct values in 500000 records, not good
at all

Thanks for your input - I am going to go and give this a really good think,
right after I make some fresh coffee
Gary