Just as a side note, ODBC and OLE DB are not mutually exclusive. In fact,
up and until very recently you could only access databases through ODBC
with the OLE-DB ODBC bridge. There are only a few native OLE-DB providers available
today - VFP of course doesn't have one (yet) and still must use ODBC with
the bridge provider.

OLE-DB provides lots of opportunity. In my initial testing of performance
with SQL server it's very noticable that performance is improved. Connectinos
are much snappier and returning large sets of data makes it's way to the
client cursor much faster.

The other thing that is really cool about OLE-DB is that it's a COM interface.
With VB and C++ you can build your own providers relatively easily. In fact,
you can rather easily build an object interface to a class that knows how
to save data or a translation layer that can act as a mediator for a legacy
application data type that may not have a Windows ODBC driver. This will also
make it possible to create very light weight data drivers that can deal with
your own data types for utility applications that may not need a full
RDBMS engine and 8 megs of MSADO drivers.

+++ Rick ---