AGAIN with the automatic spanning of datasets? Good grief, Charlie Brown. Is this truly a "high profile" issue or just your personal Moby Dick? It seems like something an assembly language or C programmer would be concerned about. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

Sheesh, Mike. It's as if somebody keeps saying that Switzerland has the biggest army on earth and if you offer a differing view, somebody responds "AGAIN with the Americans and their guns? Good grief, Charlie Brown". ;-)

As for disk spanning- it's something you took advantage of and used without thought in FP every time you created a cursor or USEd a table.

Some of its uses can (and should) be replaced. For example, "use mygianttable" may not be a resource issue in FP but there are very good reasons to use a paramaterized query (even though a parameterized local query effectively does a "use mygianttable" on your behalf ;-) )

If you're in the habit of using parameterized queries rather than scans or seeks against large tables, conversion to some other platform is easier. In our case, we've used C/S backends and parameterized queries since 1995. Any of that stuff can be ported anywhere.

But there are cases where local datasets carry massive advantage. That thinking may not be popular outside VFP (or inside VFP, it would seem ;-) ) but there are lots of developers out there who will grab hold of the local dataset and run with it as soon as the resource issue is managed.