>It is good to know that this problem could be worked around in your case, unfortunately I still don't see how to do it in my simple case of creating a CA. For example is it possible for me just to retrieve a CA with a numeric field from a COUNT(*) query ? Or will I have to do something like EVALUATE() to retrieve this value ?

For sure you can not use EVALUATE() as this is not an Oracle function. The problem is in the provider. It is not an Oracle or VFP issue as far as I can tell. SPT returns the correct (compatible) data type (double) without doing any type of data type conversion.