Hi Barbara,

Sometimes it makes a lot of difference when using remote views to access VFP data than local views. The situation would generally be when there are more than 20 users accessing the same database on a WAN.

Firstly, when we use local views we have just one DBC file where all the view definitions are stored. Which means that this file would be accessed by multiple users just for getting the view definitions. We haven't reached at getting the data yet. Then the data is requeried. The situation and speed gets worse, when all these users try to access just one form(or a set of views) all the time.

What happens with remote views is that the DBC files are supplied with the application and they will reside on a client. The only overhead (no option here {g}) here would be the ODBC. There are interesting facts here too. Like VFP closes open connections when you close all your views (forms). Establishing a connection is expensive (in time) so its better to establish a connection as soon as the application is loaded.... this also improves form loading and works with any backend.

Let me know your thoughts.

>I can see why you'd want to use local views rather than accessing the DBFs directly, but why use remote views? Surely scaling up local views to remote views for Oracle, SQL-Server, etc. would be no more difficult than changing remote views with VFP (via ODBC?) to remote views for another source?
>
>Barbara