Actually, with the table, I've never worked with it - rather I worked with
queries that ran forms and reports. The total amount of disk space taken and
resources used to open this table are more the concern.
A much smaller table would be easier to work with and move around. I should
have been clearer to begin with. Anyway, all posts are getting me to that
direction.
If your table is properly indexed and your queries are built
correctly, you'll find that there is plenty of "room to move around".
If you store the data redundantly - once in the "big" table (and do
note that 10,000,000 rows is a "big" table; 100,000 is quite modest)
and then store all the same data in a bunch of smaller tables, the
*database* will be that much more bloated and inefficient. You'll have
200,000 rows of data stored in multiple tables, with all the system
table overhead required for each additional table.
If you must do this, create a separate throwaway database for the
extracts, and don't even think about updating the data in the
extracted subtables; keeping them in synch with the master table will
be an utter nightmare.
John W. Vinson[MVP]