Creating a persistent ODBC Conenction

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In FM6 our ODBC tie to a Oracle server was slow on the first connection but very quick after that. Now with FM7 every time seems to take a long time to connect.

It looks to be acting as if after each time I connect and perform my SQL statement, it closes the ODBC connection again, rather than leave it open.

Is there a way to keep this as an open connection? This script has to verify the information in 1 field from a database that has to match on 3 other fields up to 400 times an afternoon. 3-4 seconds each record is just too slow.