Hi Brian.

I've been staying out of this thread because you were asking for unbiased opinions, but since no one has answered a couple of your technical questions, I will.

>1) We don't experience much table corruption, but as we transition to more databases vs. free tables, we are encountering more instances of corruption, epecially of the error 2091 variety. Has Stonefield resolved most of your table corruption issues? Are your applications repairing tables on the fly, or are you manually using the repair() function? It seems like a good idea to automatically repair, but perhaps problems occur when multiple apps detect the same problem and each try to repair the problem.

Although you can do repair on the fly, as our TESTERR.PRG sample shows, I don't think it's necessarily a good idea. You should normally back up before trying to repair, regardless of what tool you're using, just in case.

>2) My understanding is that the metadata must exist prior to table corruption, otherwise stonefield has no basis for the repair function. While this sounds logical, it doesn't help us when we have tables that haven't been setup with metdata. Is it possible to take a good copy of the table (but having different data) create the metadata, and use that to repair the corrupted table?

Yes. A lot of sales of SDT are to people in panic mode -- they have a corrupted table they want fixed now. So, we have them create the meta data against a good copy of the table, even an empty one, then repair the table from that. However, since you're being proactive, why not create the meta data in advance for all your tables? You never know when you'll need it.

>4) It seems like I am able to update databases & tables that are actively being used, but I did run into problems. Is it best to make sure all users are out of the program before running the update method?

Yes. VFP requires exclusive access to table for certain operations (such as updating the structure).

>5) There is some feature overlap between xCase & stonefield. Are they close enough where people use one or the other or are they used more as complementary tools?

We use xCase ourselves and consider them to be complementary. The overlap is fairly small.

Doug