Hi I have a script processfiles.R that contains, amongst other functions 1) a database access function called get_clockrates which retreives from a database, a table containing columns (clusterid, clockrate) and 45000 rows(one for each clusterid). Clusterid is an integer and clockrate is a float. 2) process_clusterid which takes clusterid as an argument and after doing some data processing, retrieves the clockrate corresponding to the clusterid. I wish to call get_clockrates only once and keep the dataframe returned by it as a GLOBAL which the function process_clusterid can use for each clusterid that it processes. To ensure that clockrates is global, I retreive it as clockrate <<- sqlQuery...... Trust that this is correct. Without the inclusion of get_clockrates function, I have run this script under R as follows> source("process_files.R"); > for (index in c(1:45000)) { try(process_file,silent=TRUE); } How do I get this code to execute get_clockrates only once and subsequently call process_file for each of the 45000 files in turn. I would greatly appreciate your input regarding my query. Thanks Lalitha ____________________________________________________________________________________ Finding fabulous fares is fun.