Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

Folks,

I am running a financial system which uses the following data in picklists:

1. Categories
2. Payees
3. Orders

For each of these I run a query to get the relevant data from the DB. I am using just Sun JDBC with Microsoft Access. I have done some performance analysis and these are my results.

-> To execute

 rs = statement.executeQuery(sqlQuery); 

Takes 700 milli seconds

-> To place the retreive the results from the result set
Takes a further 600 milli seconds.

For Categories I only have 20-30 entries in the table, and this is not
much different for other tables (i.e. Payees, Order etc).

As they all run sequentially, this takes surprisingly long time to retrieve a small quantity of data.

ANY IDEAS OF HOW TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE.

Thanks