Hello again, John.

>MS makes no extra money off of VFP but a bunch off SQL Server.

I kind of figured that this was the situation. :^)

>We are in the middle of a total rewrite of two major systems. Currently they are both
>VFP all the way. We are keeping VFP for the front end but moving to MySQL on the back
>end.

We're pretty much going down the same path, John.

>We have done a lot of testing and, in my strong opinion, the best way is to do simple
>SQL calls to MySQL and bring the data into cursors in VFP. VFP will
>minipulate/sort/dice and parse data far faster and easier than any SQL program.
>This way you have all the advantages of the rich VFP front end and, at the same time,
>the almost unlimited capacity of MySQL.

Kewl. I was wondering if anyone actually did the math and looked at cycle times
and the fastest way of getting the job done.

>I do not believe in using a Web interface becuse our programs are very user
>intensive.

A large portion of our work is done in the oil biz, with clients from
around the world. Web-based solutions allow them to access their data
from practically any location, and for our business, this is extremely
important. (More on what we do in the next remark.)

>We do business management systems and that means a lot of data
>entry and validation and a lot of grids. Maybe in 5-10 years they will have
>some web programming that will allow one to create the truly rich interface.

Well, we're into "somewhat-real-time marine/trucking logistics" tracking and
dispatch, so a client knowing where an individual item is located is very
important, especially when one piece of equipment runs a million bucks or
so.

>But why? You can do it all now with this method.

Personally, we like the "Linux, MySQL, PHP" web server with VFP on the front-end.
These products offer real-world solutions, are _cost effective_ :^), and totally
and wonderfully lying in the world of pragmatism. Also, you can build
one heck of a Linux server (with failover) with the money you save by
not having to spend a fortune buying addtional seats for this or
that product from Microsoft.

>As to how to move the data between MySQL and the VFP cursors there are a number of >opinions to be found here on the UT.
>
>For myself, it depends on how much data is being moved. If I am working on one
>customer record and one invoice then I just use ODBC. If I am moving many
>thousands of records then I use LOAD DATA INFILE and SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE.
>These are many, many times faster than ODBC.

Thanks for the info, John. I always save your replies to a save folder. Don't
want to miss out on info I know I'll need further down the line :^).

As far as ODBC goes, I can only say this: everything has its place and time.
:^)

Best Regards,

Randall