>>What is the best approach to take in building a single application that supports BOTH VFP and Client Server backends?
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>>A friend (who may or may not know more than me on this subject) said I should access the VFP DBC exclusively through remote views/ODBC so that the data access methods will be similar for both backends. Are there advantages or disadvantages to this approach?
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>Probably, the best way to combine two back-ends is to base VFP part on local views and SQL part on remote views. It doesn't matter from front-end standpoint what kind of view is actually in use, i.e. you can just toggle aliases. Keep in mind that this approach will compromise the advantages both of VFP and SQL, and it should be used only if combination of platforms is a necessity.

What is the compromise? The overhead of maintaining all those view? Your suggestion is what I had originally planned on doing -- until the advice that I received. This system I am building will have more than 50 tables & views by the time it is finished - and that will be a lot of views to maintain. I can deal with that -- but if performance suffers, I'll may be stuck maintaining 2 different versions of the application -- one for VFP and the other for Client/Server.