>>>Of course it is! My question was, albeit poorly phrased, If you going with SQL Server as the backend (through ODBC, I assume) why use VFP? In VB you would have the Object Browser that everyone on the UT is drooling over, you would have Intellisense and, you can always do cut&paste inheritance! :-)
>>
>>Ahhhh, ok I see what you mean. For me things are a little different since my environment is a datawarehouse and not a typical RDBMS. I actually have three types of data handling to worry about:
>>1- Acquisition/Collection of nonheterogenous data from 7+ sources. This data is transient, meaning daily/weekly/monthly I purge out what is there and bring down the new stuff.
>>2- Backend Handling for combining the 7+ sources into one database, then performing normalizing/denormalizing and other grooming processes to make the data useful.
>>3- Front end data handling, which is views-views-and more views from the prepocessed backend data. This will be to support over 200 reports currently in use in my FPW2.6 app. :)
>>
>>So you see, what I plan to do is move the backend data handling and acquistion work to SQL Server (mainly becuase of file size concerns). Implement job scheduling to handle that work after hours so that at 9:00am a fresh day's worth of prepared data is ready for my IS users to access with minimal processing required. Then take advantage of remote views through VFP interfaces for my front end. For now only the aquisition would involve our WAN, the rest will be kept on the department's LAN. Even farther down the road I'll have to make the preprocessed backend data available to users over the WAN, but my hope is time will allow ADO to become my answer for that.
>>
>>The way all this works now, I end up pushing out almost 10gb of processed data a month, and very little of that data is actually entered through my interfaces by my users. Hope this helps to make sense of my initial comment regarding possibly waiting for SQL Server 7.0 if the enhancements over 6.5 will be substantial enough to make my proposed backend more efficient. The way I have it planned, the more efficient I make my backend, the more simplified my front end interfaces become thanks to all the cool stuff I can do with VFP =D)
>
>I think there are a number of reasons to move data warehousing to SQL-Server, other than table size. For example OLAP and English Query. Great stuff for doing analysis.

I don't have the SQL7 beta that has OLAP, do you Craig? But the December beta that I have is very, very cool and very,very easy to use and flexible in comparison to 6.5