>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?
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>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?

You can't really compare DOS to Windows. There are many factors that affect the speed of the query. The total number of programs that are running, the size of the Windows swap file, etc.


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>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?

Yes, characters are faster


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>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?


Not always, but as a general rule, Integers are faster

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>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?

See #1.

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