John,

We were talking about opening and closing DBFs on a WAN. Sure when you're going to update data via the WAN, performance is seriously affected, if you use whenever someone else is using it to. There are circumstances when VFP has exclusive rights (Even if it has openened the filed in shared mode, for comment see my post to Cristof the other day), wich improves even updates dramaticly.

Also you've got to use your indexes wisely. Using not more indexes than you actually need (remember the DELETED() tag thing).

>I think you are overlooking some serious limitations of DBF's with respect to distributed computing. On a LAN, sure, DBF's can work fine. However, the scaleability with size, having to maintiain indexes, integrated security, etc. can also creep in. Given it's relative costs, SQL-Server brings such a bang for the buck, why you would not use that for primary data storage, especially in distributed environments is beyond me...

Sure SQL has it's advantages, but in a highly distributed enviroment when data has to come from different sites connected with a WAN, it sure still is a pain in SQL-server also, though you optimize much when using replication.

In my cases, Performance is never an issue whether to use SQL - server or not. The most important reason are:
- Transactions following the ACID properties, OLTP.
- Security, where it's fairly difficult to secure DBFs
- Standard replication

Walter,