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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>Maybe relying on SQL is hurting me and I don't understand why. Can you explain what I'm missing?

This question is obviously out of my reach. I don't know. As you understand I have heavy VFP and spotty SQL-Server experience. Actually, I was requested more to write VB-SQL, and only afterwards I converted some to VFP-SQL. My opinion (very limited and personal) is that C/S concept is slightly outdated and outpaced by WEB (unfortunately, my experience in WEB is also spotty and never included VFP tools), while local data and native access is still alive (i don't know how long).
One more thing I feel compelled to say. Actually, OO-approach is a key that moved what called procedural and code-intensive in 2x days to much less coding ground.
You know what: my browser refuses to print more lines here. It's really time for me to go sleep, I have to wake up at 5:30. I expect to be here tomorrow night. Good night.