>>Could you help me with a problem or a dilemma that I have in the conversion of an old application which it was originally written in Cobol to Visual Fox Pro.
>>The application that I'm talking about belongs to a TPA (Third Party Claims Administrator) that I work for.
>>This Company handles more than 30 different client's
>>administrations, self insured Plans and so forth. Every client has hundreds of members and dependents
>>which they all at some point in time summit their claims to be paid, that of course are handle by the TPA.
>>The problem that I'm having has to do with the design of the Database. The way it was originally handle in Cobol by the team that developed the program was that they created a different Database or set of files in a separate sub-directory for each client in order to handle all the different members and transactions belonging to a particular client.
>>Here is my question: In a relational database do I follow the same approach as they did in Cobol which I particular don't like because I can see a lot problems with that specially when it comes to maintenance, or should I handle all my Clients with its hundreds of members and transactions even though they
>>have nothing to do with each other in one huge Database?
>
>Several years ago I worked for a consulting company had had to do EXACTLY what you are doing. If memory serves me correct, I had the following DBFs:
>
>Employee.Dbf
>Dependent.Dbf (Tracks coverage and change dates of each dependent)
>Coverage.Dbf (Tracks types of coverage and dates of changes)
>
>I didn't work on the claims portion of the application...but it deffinately did NOT create a separate table each time.
>
>Craig

If you have such an appitite for space did U look into a more robust data engine like SQL-Server or Oracle? How much will this system grow and how will it be used in the future. Make sure you consider all of the Future Client/Server stuff now during the design steps...