>>I never said a thing about SEEK; OTOH, I believe that frequent reliance on SET FILTER may be an early sign of brain death accepted by many leading practitioners.
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>>I'm sure yoou'll feel religiously offended by this. Might I suggest following in the grand tradition of SouthEast Asian monks protesting the war in Vietnam with a can of gasoline and a match?
>
>It's too stupid. You even did not read what I said. I can mention that I have never used SET FILTER for the last 4 years, hopefully you will be able to read it and will not perceive as something offensive.
Good, we agree on that. I never complained about the use of SEEK, either. I did, and do, feel that there is no advantage to coding procedural layers for data handling when SQL can do at least as good a job with no loss of clarity or functionality when we deal with views and recordsets rather than filtered portions of a table. Once I've made allowance for the differences, the ease of scaling the app to a more feature-rich backend pays off handsomely.
I certainly don't have to write more code to get the work done. And there mseems to be less exposure to data errors due to system failures; my data seems to survive random system lockups better when I use SQL and views, especially in a backend database environment. Improved data recovery and transaction journaling are low- or no-cost advantages to migrating to a backend environment. In fact, data integrity is the single most frequent reason clients have wanted to migrate some or all of their application's data to a backend. Security beyond what the operating system provides is second. There are few other good alternatives if data reaches certain sizes. Other issues seem to surface well in advance of data set size.
In all probability, I didn't do an adequate job of understanding the scale of the system if the data just gets out-of-hand for VFP to handle. I might well have picked the wrong tools for the job in these circumstances.
Maybe relying on SQL is hurting me and I don't understand why. Can you explain what I'm missing?
