>Yes, I just noticed the same behavior when I tried it with a .vcx file. It works fine with a .dbf file...curious. Anyway I was able to pull the baseclasses by using:
>

>select distinct allt(left(baseclass,20)) as cBaseClass from about.vcx
>

>>
>>Hi Ken,
>>I tried that before posting and again just now. My result is a 3 record cursor with descript as C,1 field. So I get records for blank, "c", "d" when really I should be getting "cursor" and "dataenvironment". :( Any other thoughts while I play with Ed's suggestion?

There are some things we'd like to see in a form of a white paper on some properties of Fox's SQL, and the method it uses to decide widths of columns would be near the top of this list. Using AllTrim() as a column may lead to colums of different widths, depending on the contents of the first record in the table it encounters. The same goes for numeric functions: sum() may return integers even though the source column had decimals, just because the first record(s) lack(s) decimal part.

The suggestion for numerics was always to do Select 00000000.00+sum(whatever) ... ; the analogous suggestion for memos would be something which would enable the parser to determine the length of the string - like PadR(alltrim(memo_field),40) or something like that. Then you should get a C(40) column.