>I am about to embark on a new adventure- converting a FoxDOS 2.5 application used by many many people to VFP6.0. At this point I am not sure whether I should use the DBC or not. I can code for referential integrity and having code hidden in triggers etc does not exactly turn me on. Aside from updatable cusors and transaction processing are there any other advantages to using the DBC versus free tables? On the other hand are there other disadvantages to the DBC other than the risk that it gets broken and the application will not work?

Another advantage is that the DBC is a great organizational framework for your tables and views at both design and run time. Long field names are a plus.

A slight disadvantage, as you note, is that there's a little learning curve. I think most of us learned the hard way at first that you cause trouble if you just go into win explorer and delete tables contained in a dbc, for example...not a big deal, though...