Walter,

If I need to cut some wood I can use a hand saw, a small power saw or a worm drive Skil saw. The Skil saw, while heavier and more cumbersome more thanmakes up for this by being faster, more efficient and the overall best tool for the job.

It's really the same way with FoxPro and SQL (or any other tool really). SQL IS the absolute best tool for the job in many cases.

Ed's numbers are not at all far off from what I've experienced as wel. In 1990 I worked with over 1+millions of names at UC Davis Extension in California. It was a list of people we'd send mailings out to who had provided us their names over a span of about 4-5 years. I sure wish that I had the tools then that I have now! *g*

Just prior to that I had worked in retail maintaining a list of names of customers. In ONE YEAR we accumulated over 60,000 customer names that we could mail to!

Large numbers of names and information to manage is extremely common from what I have seen.

Best,

DD

PS - Happy New Year!