Is Rushmore patented? If so, when does it run out? If not, what's to prevent someone from making a VFP clone or creating, at least, a similar data engine for their programming language? Some of the internals of Rushmore are known. For instance, it's based on B-Trees, but goes further and eeks out more speed with additional techniques. There have been one or two articles in FoxTalk and/or FoxPro Advisor on it that explain some things with more detail. Of course, the answer might be "why bother" - just use MySQL or something else like Oracle or SQL Server. Valid response, of course. But local tables have proved their worth over the years. Why not continue to have both options? (Which we will via VFP for a good while, but . . .)

Russell Campbell