Hiya JimN ---

>
>Seems you may have a problem with the 'definition' of middle tier.
>
>Assuming a three tier application, middle tier would be the "BUSINESS RULES" tier, having only MARGINAL data access requirements.
>
>So just HOW does VFP's speed and flexibility help as a middle tier in a 3-tier application????
>

Hold on a sec, Jim. A middle-tier can broker business rules or facilitate data access. There's nothing that limits data access in a middle tier, on the contrary: A good n-tier application *always* handles data service requests between the front-end and the server database.