>>>I am a newbie to VFP and have a fundamental design question(s).
>>>
>>>I am designing a system (actually due to client constraints am building and designing on the fly) to handle contact, organization and membership data. I have been working with the eventual thought to upsizing the backend so I have built a vfp dbc to hold the tables and reside on a server. I have built a second dbc that connects to the first via odbc and contains remote views of the tables in the first database.
>>>
>>>Seems to me that there are a couple of options here, any insight would be welcome.
>>>
>>>1) Build a dbc with tables, place it on the network, build a dbc with remote views via odbc and distribute it with the application
>>>
>>>2) Build a dbc with tables and local views, place it on the network, build a dbc with remote views via odbc to the views and distribute it with the application
>>>
>>>3) Direct connect to the database on the server using tables and views
>>>
>>>4) Direct connect to the database on the server using local views
>>>
>>>Each seems to have it's appeal but I don't know the pitfalls or benefits. Seems that views with their buffering allows me to build a lot of controls without having to monitor the table updates but would table buffering do the same thing and allow me to have better access to index and relationship functionality.
>>>
>>>Any thoughts?
>>
>>Strictly IMHO.
>>This is trade-off situation. The best VFP performance will be reached without local views. The usual justification of views is the same as you did: future migration to another back-end. IMO, if the system requirements justify usage of another back-end then why not to build C/S system immediately: all components are available for many years. If it does not justify it, then again traditional table access will give the better performance.
>>Sometimes, it gets by habitual circle: firstly, local_view VFP system built then it shows not the very best performance and there is strong reason to move system to C/S.
>
>i have obtained "very close to native table performance" using local views.
>users access a file server on a novell network across a standard LAN line ..
>can you give me a concrete example where native table access would be significantly faster than using local views?
>TIA , Dave.

One example: if you have large table on network with SET DELETED ON and you want to select 50 records by one filter criteria, then you may find that SEEK/SKIP will work faster than p-view.
BTW: local views still use native access.