if you want speed then why use a MicroSlow database system? It's quite likely that MS SQL is chewing up so many resources on the server (just being there) that any additional work puts a stress on the server machine. If you can switch to a lightweight/fast DB server like mysql, then you can use whatever (ODBC/DBI) and see it fly. MS SQL server, Oracle and some other elephants are only meant for databases with needs like: automatic referential integrity checking/cascading, stored procedures, db scaling to several servers. I've seen these elephants used in situations where MS Access or DBase should have been used instead. So if you don't need an elephant, get a gazelle :) Chris Chris