>>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.
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>Actually mine is a gigantic project with hundreds of places where i will need to change the _tally handling.
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>Thanks. That will save me half the effort!

I've already done it on someone's project, when converting from 7 to 9, and only had to hunt "group by" in code references, and had to have a ready search/replace on "if _tally=0" to replace with "if isnull()", where I'd only have to insert the name of a field of the resulting cursor, or name of the array. Once you get the hang of it, you can do about twenty or thirty of those in an hour. I know it takes only about ten seconds to do, the rest of the time is checking that it's right.