If I am retrieving data multiple times in one routine I will leave it connected until all data has been retrieved. The reason we began doing it this way was because we didn't know how many user licenses we were ultimately going to get for SQL. So we didn't want to run out of connections. We since have gotten seats for every user at our company so now it is not an issue. If your application is running and you use the connect once method, this takes up resources on SQL whether the VFP applicaiton is sitting idle or not or accessing data or not. If you don't have a lot of users probably not an issue. We elected to attempt to keep the number of connections to a minimum.

>I guess my main concern with connecting, then disconnecting was the time it took , but you may be right that it takes very little time, I'll have to test this tomorrow. But I also wonder what other benefits can be gained from connecting & disconnecting vs. connecting once & staying connected.