>I have been using _tally= 0 condition in my programs in VFP6 to check if any records are returned by SQL Select.
>
>In VFP9 a null record is returned and value of _tally is 1.
>
>How best should I change my code to verify if any useful records/rows were returned?

It only happens "when using aggregate functions, such as MAX( ), in the SQL SELECT command without a GROUP BY clause, and no matching records are found, Visual FoxPro returns a result set with a single record and _TALLY set to 1. In versions prior to Visual FoxPro 9.0, no records are returned, and _TALLY is set to 0". You can use ISNULL() function to check return value.