Hi, Al...

It was an early version of MySQL 5.0, and at the time there was still some question about support for stored procs, UDFs, and triggers.

I just checked their site and it does seem like they've finally gotten their act together on 5.0.

And yes, you did say that about SQL express, sorry.

One of my clients is using SQL 2005 Express and it works great. I'm partial to all the new language features in SQL 2005, like recursive queries, PIVOT, and better support for table-valued UDFs.

A question for Michel - I don't know if anyone suggested this, but regardless of which back-end database, have you considered taking the specific query you initially described, and converting it to a stored procedure? I'm assuming you're using the VFP provider that comes with VFP9, which has better stored procedure support than VFP8.

Kevin