William,

a few notes.

- SQL Express, is much more difficult to worry free distribute to many clients, esspecially when those clients are not IT persons. Just google arround for problems installing SQL express. Personally I've had some horrors from a SQL server based accounting system, that for some reason refused to install MSDE on the machine. No matter what we tried (deinstalling, cleaning up the registry, etc), it just did not. Had to reinstall windows to get it back up. VFP is painless in this respect.

- SQL Express is much more difficult to administer when you just want to poke arround in the database. Rememeber the is no such thing as USE, BROWSE, and change some values (unless using remote views of course).

- VFP is limited to 2GB per file, no limitation on database size.

- VFP is pretty solid. Like srjdan, I agree when using buffering and transactions, corruptions should be pretty scarse. Having to support hundreds of users on many VFP databases for more than 15 years out there I can say it only happens very occasionally. And even then it likely is something we can fix with a fixdbf utility. If you experience this as a problem, there is definately something wrong in how you have coded your VFP application.

- Security. If you want there are a number of things you can do to secure your dbfs. Like cryptor, using database events to control access, run the application under different user credentails, Terminal Services, Citrix. Ideal? Absolutely not, but zero security is not the exact word either.

- As for internet access. Terminal Services or citrix is the way to go. Even our SQL server version of our software does not perform well over the internet (mainly because of the large number of SQL statements and the rountrip time) aside from the fact that clients do not want to make their database avialable to the internet without a VPN, so we insist supporting our application through a remote control solution. In this respect there is no advantage to both of them.

Personally, always having a command window in my applications, I find the VFP version much better maintainable as it is easy to just USE a table, BROWSE and do some VFP DML. With the SQL server version, I always have to write SQL statments and execute them with SQLEXEC() and make the SPT cursor updatable.

AS for Referential integrity. With VFP and TaxRi I can temporarely disable or change RI rules (like forcing a cascading delete of an item, depite the general RI rules), with SQL server I can't with the build in RI. We are working on a way to do this in SQL server with triggers, but it is much more painfull than in VFP as SQL server 2000 does not have a convinient way to store session variables and have to store those into (temp) tables and query upon those whenever you need them.

All in all, my view on this matter is a bit more nuanced than yours, though I agree that SQL server is a good product, best suited for situations where your application runs in a controlled environment with IT support, I can still see value to VFP applications where you just hand over a CD to your friend and say, just put it into your CD drive and folow the instructions.


Walter,