Well, thanks to all who responded.
FWIW, tha's what we did for our customer :
We hired 2 PB developers for one day and developed a little SQL Server 7 app, against 2 of our developers using VFP 6.0.
The good news
The VFP team finished at 4:15 pm ( no framework or generator used). The PB Team finished (no PFC used) at 8:20 PM.
The bad news:
Both apps accesed data at about the same speed, but the PB app shows screens 2-3 seconds faster than the VFP one.
Our customer bought the VFP idea (it's a big change for him)
Regards

>Yes, ODBC is a MS standard, but today it is pretty much an insdustry standard and works with non-MS platforms as well.
>Also while ODBC performance was really bad few years ago it is better today
>
>>
>>Keep in mind that ODBC is a Microsoft standard. Many back ends work much better with their companies' native drivers than with ODBC. In fact, a few years ago even SQL Server worked much slower with ODBC than with native access.