>>>I have been involved in a couple of projects like that. One was a massive commercial application and yes, it was that simple to start >>with. But anyone new to sql server i.e. you and some of your customers, start to hit issues. Some purely learning curve ones >>others just sql server issues you either didn't know or you could have done differently. It too way too long to deliver and >>commercially speaking it was a bad decision. It's still wrapped up nicely sitting on the shelves. It offered great experience.
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>>>The second project was smaller, less than 20 customers, we had alot more control in terms of going in to sort issues. Not too >>much conflicts with corporate procedures. It's been great.
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>>>I know there is usually a business requirement to solve a problem here and now. But in the idea world, I would invest into the future >>technology.
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>Thanks Mathias,
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>With the exception of a couple of clients we have a close working relation ship and 90% of our clients have no IT department and no IT support other than us. Idealaly I woudl like to keep the VFP tables version for single pc and peer to peer sites and only use the SQL back end for larger sites, is that possible?
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>Regards
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>Gary.

Gary,

That's is possible yes.

If you neatly isolate the data plumbing (updates, retrievals, inserts, deletes) have them in a business layer (neat and tidy), get the system to work as at now, then switching the data source would be much simplified. 95% of your code is really the same so you'd be be building the 2 apps from the same source code. Switch the data source at the application level.

The thing that made our project hard work was working with the original source code that had been developed by 100s of developers the years.