>Has anyone experience of linking a Lotus Notes system to VFP or indeed any relational database? I am being asked to look into this and the feedback received so far is that Notes is cumbersome, takes a long time to develop and is generally resource hungry.
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>Any comments would be appreciated

We tried using Notes to execute some VFP code to generate reports. It works fairly well as long as you have a Notes Developer with enough knowledge of how to call a VFP executable from Notes. The biggest problem is having the VFP runtime files generally available to all users who will be using Notes.

Conversely, using VFP to get at Notes data is a pain because of Lotus' ODBC drivers [i.e., they suck]. We have resorted to writing the Notes data into Oracle on the fly and accessing the data that way. Works quite well as long as the Oracle DBA doesn't mess with the Oracle access rights.

Keep in mind Notes is in no way relational. It can be made to work like a relational DB, but its performance never approaches that of a true RDBMS. Some database!