cursor performance question

The answer may very well be "it depends" on the actual data, but I am wondering which aproach to adding a table to a new table to a select will be better. Brief description of enhancement: We need to modify a cursor to join with an additional table. There is a one-to-many relationship between the original cursor (a 2 table join) and the new table we need info from (I have no idea how many "many-to-one" will actually be with our data, but I suspect we are talking about increasing the number of rows returned by a factor of 10 if we were to simply add the new table to the existing cursor....The original cursor returns between 200 and 1000 rows (I think, not entirely sure). The 2 options I see are: 1: Just add the 3rd table to the "from clause" and add code to process it within the existing loop. OR 2: Add an inner loop (with a new cursor) and leave the existing cursor alone. Option 1 is easier to implement, but then again, it's not a big deal to add an inner loop, so that's not very significant. But, the kicker is that the original cursor may now return 1000 rows instead of 100 (I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, so if you believe it matters what the actual numbers will be, please let me know...there are about 20 fields selected in the existing cursor). Option 2 means that we will have to open a new cursor for every iteration of the existing cursor, but we will not have the overhead of selecting the same data from the existing cursor over and over again. Obviously either option is going to decrease performance, but the question is which one will affect performance the least. For empirical reasons, let's assume that either way, we take full advantage of any existing (or ones we may add) indexes. Interesting trade-off, no? This happens to be an area where we really care about performance [My gut instinct tells me we should abandon 4GL and write it in C, but then again, we would have the same question since we are accessing the database in either case.] Short of coding both possibilities and running benchmarks on them, does anyone have any ideas????? Thanks in advance, Danny Wright #include <StdDisclaimers.h> And remember Objective-C is more object oriented than C++, but still C is a helluva lot better than 4GL!