My company is evaluating an Enterprise-Wide software system. The process has been long and cumbersome and the selection criteria has narrowed the huge market down to three vendors' offerings.

The front runner is a package written and developed in Visual FoxPro. It uses the FoxPro database format for all system tables.

There is some major concerns internally about this Xbase format. In the past we have run into some serious database volume issues ( tables w/1million + records) in this environment. Reindexing and corruptible headers are just a few areas that have troubled us in the past. Our data volume needs have continued to grow since our switch to Btrieve database format. So far this environment seems to be much more stable.

My question is this, how much concern should I have for a database
environment in FoxPro? Is this a step backwards? Will I again run into issues with extremely large tables. Will I have to reindex all the time? What will my performance be like versus Btrieve?

I know alot of these questions are determined by the program logic itself and it's not all up to the database. The vendor and their client base seems to echo that the FoxPro environment is "rock solid" even at large data volume levels. Can any of you FoxPro experts out there validate this? Point me in the right direction. It seems like our data volume needs might push this product offering into an uncharted area. I would like to put this issue to rest for our CEO who has great concerns based on his fears from our Xbase/Clipper past.

As the systems analyst for this project, I would hate to throw out an
excellent vendor offering based on unrealistic fears.

Please help! Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Ian Bobo
Systems Analyst
Performance Designs, Inc.
ibobo@performancedesigns.com