<< but this is not efficient nor probably even possible. The Rbase table will have well over 200,000 rows and will grow while the ODBC table will have 100,000+ rows. It would probably take hours to run the above if it would run at all. I cannot flag the ODBC records in any way as I cannot change the data structure or data in the ODBC database. What makes this difficult is that the unique index on the foreign data base is order number, but it is not numeric, it is alphanumeric. So an order could be OR123456 and the next order could be AB123456. >>
Why do you think it will take so long? The search (assuming the order id is indexed in both tables) shouldn't be bad. The amount of time that it will take to execute the command will depend on how many orders have to be added to the archive each time you run. Assuming that's small (a couple of hundred, let's say), I don't see why this should take a lot of time. For greatest speed in archiving, keep the target archive table free of any indexes except the order id. -- Larry
