>The VFP UPDATE-SQL command has no special limit besides general limit of 255 fields per table. Who knows what kind of update statement VFP generates for a view.

CursorAdapter knows, if you use it, and write some code in BeforeInsert or BeforeUpdate - the update statement is one of the parameters. I had that error when the length of the statement was about 8K. I managed to get around the limitation by shortening the alias of the cursor, because the statement looks like

insert into targetalias (field1, field2, field3, ... fieldN) values (?sourcealias.field1, ?sourcealias.field2, ?sourcealias.field3, ...?sourcealias.fieldN)

The statement for update is equally verbose - doesn't check for changed values, IIRC it lists them all. With long field names and a long alias, at about 200 fields it can grow over 8k (in compiled code, which seems to be the limit - but this is just field names, which don't get compiled any shorter than they are).

So... this seems to be the limitation. One way would be to break this into two shorter (insert plus update, or two updates) statements, or as many as needed.