>We have a general cross-reference excel sheet which I want to convert into a table and work into our Visual FoxPro program. I want to setup a search feature and have it search thru various tables, memo fields, this new cross-reference table, etc. for what the user types in and display results kind of in the manner an internet search engine would do. I was analyzing what would be the best tools to use for an efficient search. I was considering using the ATC function. Does anyone have any other suggestions to direct me to which may work better/quicker?

I wrote a Bible search/study program where the search could be a complex search options of 'Has Any", "Has All", "Contains", "Search As Phrase" along with the ability to combine with AND and OR keywords. The Bible contains over 32,000 records (each record is a verse) and I can have multiple versions. The search uses the ATC() function to perform the bulk of the searching.

Now for the tricky part -- in my program the Bible database is stored directly on the PC harddrive. The network is used for shared resources (non Bible stuff). So the search is not being performed over a network for verse content that matches the search criteria, but directly on the local PC. In this case the search returns very acceptable results in under 3 seconds. However, if the Bible database is moved to a network server drive, then the search results are far slower. This is due to how the VFP database functions -- it is NOT a client-server database. The search engine is the VFP which is on the client PC and this has to access the database over the network. So the same query now can take into minutes -- too long.

So, if you have a network setup, then you must use a client-server RDBMS and then SQL. In this case look into the keyword indexing features of the RDBMS.