First, thank you for your message.
But this was not my question. Say, I don't use an ALIAS, I wanted to know if I have to use the the SQL Server name before every use of the table in the entire SQL Select expression.

For example, If I take your example and the table TestTable is from a different database, than the default database, do I have to use that different database name?

SELECT TestTable.Name from MySecondSQLServerDatabase.TestTable where MySecondSQLServerDatabase.TestTable.first_name = 'XYZ'

You see the table TestTable is in both the default SQL Server database and in some other SQL Server database (MySecondSQLServerDatabase). So if I don't use this MySecondSQLServerDatabase before the column "first_name", will SQL server select get this column from the default DB or from the second DB (MySecondSQLServerDatabase)?

I probably didn't phrase my questions correctly.

>As a general statement, use an ALIAS after the "from".
>I'm not 100% positive if you're using SQL Passthrough from VFP, but as a general statement, I can do this in SQL server
>
>USE ProductionDB
>GO
>
>SELECT ProdTable.Name as ProductionName, TestTable.Name as TestName
>FROM ProductionTable ProdTable
> JOIN TestDB.TestingTable TestTable
> WHERE ProdTable.SomeKey = TestTable.SomeKey
>
>Once you have the ALIAS, you shouldn't need to have to reference the 2nd database every time (again, to best of my awareness, but I haven't done anything from VFP->SQL in a long time, so you might want to test to be sure)