>XBase tables store all their data (with certain exceptions in memo and >general fields) as ASCII characters. This means that at some point in the >process this data has to be translated from character to 8 byte double >precision floating point numbers for your numeric fields. By contrast, the >C program may not have this overhead. this is no longer true in VFP integer,double and datetime are binary type (this is one of the reasons integer is the prefered "primary index" ) integer - 4 byte double 8 byte (this is not like Float which is just like numeric) Arnon