I have a bunch of Paradox tables and have been experimenting with Tquery and
TTable. I would like to use query to ease any future move to a SQL database,
but find them a LOT slower using ORDER BY against Table.IndexName.
(IndexName is not a property of TQury as far as I can see)

Is this just a fact of life, or am I missing something?

Cheers

For local tables, BDE actually directly manipulates Paradox tables
and index files. That is why they are so fast. For server based
datasets, it has to go thru layers. For future portability, SQL would
be better. But here is the catch: Local SQL is NOT nearly as complete as
you would want it to be to have an application which could be ported
just by changing the Alias (well, you won't be able to do this any way
as ever server as it's own extensions). Sooner or later you will have
written a feature in a way that to convert it to another kind of SQL
will be an absolute pain in the *%^*#@