<<Let us assume that manual masters are the problem. One way to avoid this situation is not to use them. You trade greater concurrency for automatic integrity checking of "foreign" keys. You could always turn your manual masters into detail sets, with an automatic master for the key, then program in logical lookups against the "master" detail set instead of depending upon Image to detect a missing key.>> This is a good point; we ended up doing just this conversion a few years ago. The previous design had dozens of manual master sets, and most of these were also related to detail sets keyed on the manual master's key item. The concurrency problems became unsupportable, so we converted almost all of the manual master sets to an auto-master-plus-detail configuration. Our remaining manual master sets are, with one exception, stand-alone "mini-databases", with no other sets having search items keyed on the master set key. Steve Dirickson WestWin Consulting (360) 598-6111 [log in to unmask]