At first, thanks to all who have replied to my questions, exspecially Stefano and Dieter. Now i know, thats not the Z SQL method that slows down, but the DTML-Batch-processing. As i told Stefano in a private response (forgot to change the to: in the reply :-), i have come to an acceptable state in the project., using an external method with the low-level mysql-module _mysql. code looks like this: db = _mysql.connect(<connect -parameters>) db.query(qs) l = db.store_result() l.data_seek(int(start)) x = l.fetch_row(amount) r = l.num_rows(), x db.close() return r qs is a generated querystring by passed parameters, dammned i cant use dtml-group here :-) start is the index of the first record to pass back to the dtml-in loop, amount the number of records to display on one page. i return a tuple with the number of all records selected, and the subset of records itself, so i can properly display the number of all records. the advantage in using the low-level module is, that the query only selects the records, and with fetch_row i can only retrieve the data i need to display on one page. but drawbacks are as follow: each query generates a new connection, no caching, no dtml-batch processing, this is done by hand with variables in the request-object passed by parameters on the links to the next-prev page. but it works and is acceptable fast. To Igor: to use an external method, create a .py file in the zope/Extensions directory, and define a function in it. then add this external method to your zope-project, with name of the file (without .py) and the name of the func. it is described in brief in the Zope-help and in "using Python based script - Using External Methods" in the Zope-book Part II, Chapter 10 "advanced Zope scripting", link is http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ScriptingZope.dtml http://www.zope.org/Documentation/How-To/ExternalMethods is another link, explaining more, especially the important self-parameter. Thanks again to Stefano for the detailed info about the design of the app itself (its allways good to know what i am doing ... ;-) I hope i can change the whole design, restricting the use of the query-parameters, so i dont have to hack around anyhow. really thanks for your open words ! Rudi