John,
I want to analyze the difference here, in what may be a totally uneducated way. VFP and Oracle store their data in files on a computer. If I have rights to the computer and it's file system, I can read, copy, and perhaps edit the data. To protect the data, Oracle makes me get a connection and I must know a user name and password. Of course I can protect VFP data through network security in much the same way. Is SQL 7.0 or Oracle's security better than NT's? As far as I know, they both work about the same. I can give rights so users cannot see certain files, only read certain files, or read and write to specific files.

Now I'm not claiming there's no advantage to using Oracle. Certainly, it is less likely to experience a corrupted file than is a DBF.

The concern of viewing a table using explorer seems totally off base. If I have rights to view data, whether it's in Oracle or DBFs, then I can view it. It's no problem to pull Oracle data into Excel and view away. If I'm not allowed to see certain data, it should be separated out into a file that I cannot see through Explorer. That's not hard, but if you can't set up the proper access rights to VFP data files, what makes you think you can with Oracle.

No matter what the architecture is, access is given if I have the appropriate name and password--if I don't I should be locked out.


>Hi Nick,
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>While I agree with you that using obscure or unpopular databases is not a sound idea, I have to say that once you start looking at going to the internet or distributed applications that need security, you should be looking at a secure database such as SQL Server or Oracle.
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