Mark(s :) )
you are diregarding an important issue which is the scope of the Data , number of concurrent users etc. for the targeted system
MS software (and that is NT,SQL Server and VFP) does not scale as well as Oracle
(or other RDBMSs and OSs) on the higher ends

For some setups VFP (as a backend) will be faster and for others it wont for some situations VFP can't even handle the size of the data - so, again, i don't think you can really say one is better than the other, nor you can directly compare them

Arnon