Chrome, I had the same type of problems trying to incorporate things like pace and ability rankings in my Access greyhound databases. It was beyond my programming abilities so in the end I was exporting all the form into Excel, doing all my rankings etc using array formula then reimporting into Access. Terribly inefficient and time consuming.

Another thing that initially bugged me was the inability to simply select the last n records of each ***/horse to produce a form guide. The 'top n records' function only produced the top records for the whole dataset, not for each individual runner. Of course I was able to eventually get around this problem with programming but didn't think it should have been necessary for something so simple and basic.

Wesmip, I have never looked at Oracle before and know nothing of Java but am reading this thread with some interest as I am presently trying to motivate myself to build a couple of new databases so that I can query data in ways that can't be done by the commercial dbs I am using. Thanks for your input. You just might motivate this tired old brain into trying something new.

Wunfluova