Recently a prospect pointed out to me that they still do all of their ad-hoc queries in DOS, since it is so much faster than VFP. Curious, I tried it out, and found a few interesting results. Would any enlightened gurus care to explain some of these to me?

1. In DOS, selecting to a cursor can return 20% of a 5 million record file in a second or so, while VFP takes just as long for a cursor as a DBF. I know that FPDOS is merely opening the table with a filter on an index in another workarea, but why isn't VFP?

2. The SELECT uses a BETWEEN with a date field. By indexing on DTOS and SELECTing on same, I got a faster result. Is this valid or a fluke? IOW, do characters sort faster than dates?

3. Really strange, I added an integer field and converted the dates to integers, indexed, and selected on that. Took longer than the DTOS flavor. Huh? I thought integers were the bees knees?

4. Generally, I understand that the Win95 overhead will slow down anything, but is it normal to see the exact same SQL SELECT (to DBF) execute four times slower in VFP 6 than in FPDOS 2.5? Is this what I should expect?

I know it's a lot, any replies will be greatly appreciated.