>>The biggest difference is obviously Oracle is pure C/S and the handling, retrieving, adding, deleting, updating of data. Every row in every Oracle table has to be able to be uniquely identified. You are dealing with remote views and ODBC so everything is SQL.
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>>As for performance, I have no trouble with Oracle performance vs VFP native tables. As long as your Oracle tables have indexes so queries can be optimized, retrieval is fast. Only factor is wiring (bandwidth) and amount of data going over the wire. Two basic protocols are generally used -- SPX or TCP/IP. IP is faster.
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>>As for front end, VFP is excellent interface to an Oracle backend. Even better (and easier to use) than the Oracle developer products I have used (Power Objects, Dev2000, etc). Before we decided on VFP where I work, our IRM Chief pitted two of us against each other to determine the best tool. I used VFP and the other guy used Power Objects. The Chief selected VFP (v 3.0b at the time).
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> Thanks for your quick response! (The thread continues to amaze ...)
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>What I'm looking for is data that supports they hypothesis that a foxpro COM object sitting on a server and operating on foxpro tables will serve data to a client faster than a an Oracle backend. Did you ever do any comparisons of Oracle queries vs. Foxpro queries, where Oracle was querying an Oracle version of the data and Foxpro was querying a Foxpro version of the data? I think that Foxpro would blow Oracle away in this situation. (This would at least give me an upper bound on the performance improvement ... )

IMHO, I don't think you can do a fair comparison because you are dealing with 2 very different types of databases. VFP will be faster (and much easier to deal with) if you retrieve and manage data the way you have to in Oracle (unless you have a crappy file server where VFP tables and DBC are stored versus a hummer of an Oracle server). You can not manage Oracle data the way you can in VFP. Oracle data will all be handled through remote views. If you have individual views on 2 Oracle tables, you can not relate the 2 views. You have to create a separate view that joins the 2 tables and selects the appropriate fields from each. This technique takes advantage of the indexes that exist on the Oracle side.

In some cases, I have had better performance retrieving an appropriately limited dataset from an Oracle server than from local VFP tables on a local Novell file server. Of course I accessed Oracle via a dedicated TCP/IP T1 connection versus a local 4mbps Novell token ring to the VFP DB.