>>Jim, I never said that the SET FILTER / RELATION / SKIP and SEEK commands were a poor per se. What I did say, in my original response to Walter, was that these commands are easy for a developer to rely upon at the expense of not learning SQL and designing apps which can be scaled.
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>I agree with you in regards to the SET FILTER issue, but I find that the others are useful even in a C/S environment when woirking with result sets.

I'm curious. Leaving SEEK alone for the time being, under what circumstances would you use SET RELATION and SET SKIP?

When I started playing around with parameterized views a couple of years ago, I found that I could set the parameter(s) to a field(s) of another view(s):

SELECT * FROM mytable INTO CURSOR myview WHERE mytable.field = ?yourtable.field

Since then, I have never used SET RELATION / SKIP and have never looked back. I don't have to create temp indexes on views, I don't have to keep track of relations, work areas, etc., all I have to do is REQUERY("myview").

Now that I'm on the subject of work areas, it's too bad that SCAN/ENDSCAN and LOCATE doesn't have an IN clause like SKIP or GOTO.

I also found interesting your comment concerning why anyone should use VFP if they are not using SET RELATION / SKIP et al. I have to strongly disagree with you here and ask that you clarify this for the lurkers.