^What Marco said.

Rather than retrieve all of the data in one retrieve, add a set of criteria options to the window that contains the DW. For example, ifd your retrieval includes NAME, COMPANY, AGE, CITY, STATE, COUNTRY as part of the dataset, add a groupbox above the DW control where the user can specify FROM and THRU values on these fields.

FROM NAME: ________________         THRU NAME: _____________

FROM AGE:   ________________          THRU AGE:  ______________

FROM CITY:  ________________          THRU CITY: ______________


GET
... and so on. Like this:

The date range retrieves a set of UIDs.
The user can select the range of UIDs to be retrieved.

Here's an example with a set of fixed value parameters:


There's a menu item/Toolbar icon that RUNS the retreive to retrieve the data based on the criteria specified. "None" means no limit on that parameter.

Olan

I'd definitely be interested to hear what you're doing with those 3M records.  Isn't there some way to break the retrieval into logical groups that would be much smaller and process each group individually?  Another option might be to create a temp or working table, retrieve that large resultset into that, then process from that table.  Maybe a stored proc that retrieves to a file, then process the file?  There's probably  lots of other options other than trying to retrieve 3M rows into a client DW.

Kevin