Hi Kelvin,

You are really making a tradeoff of network resources/time (to request and receive engines' data), and shifting it more to your server. Even with several database files, I bet it will run faster than an off-server query as long as you have no more than a few thousand records in each file. As Kurt said, you'll just have to copy it several times to see. I'd be interested in your results.

There's far less data to parse from a database file, as the program doesn't have to parse through an entire web page to get what it wants, and the database files are in a "fixed" format. Also, you're not writing the files, which generally takes longer than just a read.

Jeff