>>>> And thought that I had been through it all. Certainly not. I learned quite a few tricks reading this great resource.
>>
>>Recently I dug out one of Tamar's historic articles wrt a parsing need. The article covered the ancient Copy to Array that is very quick for smaller resultsets and resulted in new functions in VFPA to speed up bit manipulation- check out VFPA's new Calculate BOR/BAND expressions.
>>
>>I learned something else new last week: GATHER performs on-the-fly casting for different field types.
>>
>>
create cursor c_test (intvar i, dubvar B, charvar c(20),datevar c(20))
>>append blank
>>intvar="100"
>>dubvar="100"
>>charvar=100
>>datevar=date()
>>gather memvar
>>browse
Also does with an object, on-the-fly conversion will work where insert from name won't (which is weird, though).
>Actually SQL server does do the same in many instances.
Not quite. Its conversion is very limited - you may have two million strings containing digits and they'll be converted into integers, but then a sixteen minute transaction will take a long time to revert because two million and first string contains digits and an extra character. It will bang gloriously, and I think you know some examples of that.