Hiya John ----

And this is important when.......? When an application needs to be scalable; that's the point I was trying to make. If an application is never going to grow beyond a set, reasonable amount of users I was advocating sticking with the good ole DBF format.

Then again, it might be fun to create a framework using ADO recordsets and ADO....provided that we weren't sticking a client with bad performance and the apparently harsh limitations of MSDE....we could call the framework the XXX Framework --- for ADOlts only (lol).



>Whether or not you decide to go to MSDE is/should not be predicated on the size of data. Rather, it should be decided based on whether you need to go to SQL, or you need a portable version of SQL. As for SQL Anywhere, I have no idea how it performs so I cannot comment there. The thing to keep in mind is that MSDE is a portable, 100% compatible version of SQL-Server.
>
>
>>Hiya JVP ----
>>
>>This is a peculiar issue for Fox people to be agonizing over. SQL Anywhere is dirt cheap and performs much the same purpose as MSDE, yet no one has ever griped about it. Why? Because at the scale that people would think of using SQL Anywhere, one tends to keep the native Fox DBF format.
>>
>>If you think your app is going to be scaling up in the future, use remote views, SPT, whatever and hook to whatever makes you happy.... If not, use DBFs.
>>
>>BTW: I agree with your assessment of SQL Server and the price.
>>
>>
>>>
>>>I hear your pain here, and I don't entirely disagree. Then again, if you have 10-20 users, SQL-Server is not that pricey. Out of the box, you get 5 connections. 5 more, that is about $150. So, you are talking about $1,000-1,200. For a dept-wide app, that is not bad. If I were charging $30,000 for an app, the price of SQL-Server makes up less than 10% of the price.
>>>
>>>When it comes to what MSDE was made for, this bullet point from the web site really hits home:
>>>
>>>Build mobile computing solutions that support merge replication with a central SQL Server