> VFP, IMHO, is far superior as a database engine than
 > Jet or MSDE. By a landslide. It ain't even close.

Allan: Some VFP and VB developers recently held a competition of sorts over in the DevX newsgroups, and the results demonstrated that VFP's native database access is indeed much faster than using Jet or ADO from VB. The downside of using VFP for data access in a VB app is that both VB and VFP have rather large runtimes, which would both have to be loaded while the app is running.

If the database will reside on the user's PC and be accessed by a single user, Jet is fine. (In fact, if you don't need multi-table joins and SQL capability, you may be better off using a flat file and avoiding the overhead of Jet. See my article, "When Not to Use Jet" in the Sept., 1995 issue of VBPJ for more information.)

MSDE is good for databases that will reside on a server and be shared by up to five users; if more than five simultaneous connections are needed, the database should be upsized to SQL Server 7.0.

In cases where it is impractical to use SQL Server but the database will be shared by a potentially large number of users, use VFP. Create a VFP COM server that accesses the database and passes ADO recordsets to clients. Because the COM server resides on a shared server, you don't have the problem of the VB and VFP runtimes hogging memory on the same machine.
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Phil Weber
DevX.com, Inc.