In the January, 1998, issue of Pinnacle's Smart Access, Julianne Lee and I wrote an article entitled "Is the Query Compiled?" that discusses the undocumented ways to discover whether or not Microsoft Jet has compiled your query, and tricks on how and why you might want to either compile or decompile queries for performance tuning or to avoid bugs. Here is the issue's sample code and the article that explains it all is available here. (Pinnacle charges $5.00 for each article. I do not profit from this).