>Given the following:
>
>1) Full client/server application, never opens base tables directly, only uses views, etc.
>
>2) Application can utilize either the built-in VFP engine or SQL Server.
>
>Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Why?

>1) Using SQL Server as the data engine will perform 3 to 5 times faster than VFP and there's nothing you can do about it.

Disagreed, because VFP-performance will be
a) specific to each workstation hardware
b) depends on interface arrangements. Assuming that you compare with SQL-server, i.e. just one/few records will be 'retrieved' by interface at a time, then SEEK() will be probably even faster.

>2) If the application were modified to take advantage of "older" style code, such as SEEK followed by SCAN WHILE..ENDSCAN, it would no longer be a client server app, but it could perform comparably to the client server app running with SQL Server.

Agreed. However VFP Select-SQL may also give good results, and it still not client-server.

>I ask these things because this exact scenario seems to be happening. We converted a very large FP 2.6 app over to VFP, and along the way we also converted it over to a design that is fully client/server compatible, knowing that we would eventually want to be able to use SQL Server on the back end. The fact that we're fully client/server seems to hinder VFP considerably, as huge amounts of index data has to go across the wire to do SQL SELECT statements in VFP. For example, our testing revealed that doing a fully optimized query such as this:
>
>SELECT * ;
> FROM aaprocqt ;
> WHERE estno = lcEstNo ;
> INTO CURSOR vaprocqt
>
>on a 200MB table with a CDX that is approximately 65MB, and has an index on just estno as well as DELETED() results in 20-30MB of data going over the wire. Obviously if we did the following:
>
>SELECT aaprocqt
>AFIELDS(laStru)
>CREATE CURSOR vaprocqt FROM ARRAY laStru
>SEEK lcEstNo
>SCAN WHILE estno = lcEstNo
> SCATTER MEMVAR
> INSERT INTO vaprocqt FROM MEMVAR
>ENDSCAN
>
>there wouldn't be anywhere near the same amount of data going over the wire, but this second example is completely NOT client/server.