Showing top 5 without bogging down the server

[Matthew R White]

I have a table with over 100,000 records and I'm trying to show the top 5 accounts by premium for each month in a portal.

One way of doing this is to create a portal and then filter the portals by premium size (so I get the top 5 at the top of the portal) and then filter or show only the top 5 records

I'm just worried that with the amount of data, every time this portal loads it will take significant calculations. Is there a better way to store this or create another table to keep the usability quick for my users?

Thank you in advance

[Fitch]

Is the "premium" field stored? If not, that could be potentially the biggest performance hit.

You said top 5 for each month, does that mean one month per portal or what?

One alternate possibility is to run a script that returns the data via ExecuteSQL, e.g.:

SELECT account, premium FROM yourTable ORDER BY premium DESC FETCH FIRST 5 ROWS ONLY

...or something like that.

PS: it would help answer your questions if you update your forum profile with FileMaker version, OS, expertise level etc.