>Right now I have been developing my package with just the base VFP tables.
>
>Will this work for all of my clients? Should I be looking into some kind of backend server? If so is there a general rule of thumb of how many computers will work with just the VFP tables as opposed to a backend server?
>
>Thank you very much,
>Paul Acton

I have the feeling, based on my own experience and what I hear from others, that VFP tables on a network file server will max out somewhere between 40 and 100 users.

I generally agree with Daniel's analysis of the trade-offs in using SQL Server.

A rule-of-thumb for SQL DB costs is about $200 per user or seat. At about $10,000 you can purchase a site license.

There is a possible approach to this problem that intrigues me: using a VFP backend-COM server with local tables and passing data back and forth to VFP front-end clients with XML. Data reliability should go way up since only one processor is writing to the VFP tables instead of up to 100 processors each with many open connections.

I would be very interested to know how many clients such a VFP backend could keep up with if it was running on a very fast box (dual Pentium III's with ultrawide SCSI RAID disks).

The biggest advantage to this approach would be speed and relatively low cost. (No extra cost for the DB.)

The biggest problem I see with this approach is how to handle batch operations. Perhaps two VFP programs running on the same box, one for small data requests and the other to queue up batch requests.

Of course the backend code should use local views only so that moving the data to a SQL DB would be straightforward.

Can you picture this?

Peter Robinson