We have a database with ~ 400,000 records. I am trying to purge (delete) some data based on a found set of records.

Did a ctrl F - entered single criteria - the letter O --- Clicked find records -- found 325,000 matching records. Records were found in 10 seconds. I next elected to delete the found records.

It is incredibly slow. It's been running for 2 hrs and so far, i've only deleted 35,000 records.

Is there a trick to making this delete process run faster?:

I see the same slowness when importing records. Yes there are calc being done as part of the import, but in other applications I use, the delete and import run in under 5 minutes. In Filemaker, it takes hours --- go out for a long lunch and then come back.

What's the trick? How do I speed up the delete and import process???

One small thing that may help is to do this on a layout that has no fields displayed, in case any data is refreshing during the process.