From the Hacker's Guide: "The help hints and our tests confirm that REPLACE is generally faster than UPDATE. In exclusive mode, the differences are small, but with shared tables, we see tremendous differences. The reason for the difference is that UPDATE uses record locking while REPLACE locks the entire table. There may be cases where you can't lock the table, so UPDATE's behavior can save your skin in spite of its performance consequences".

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>Can somebody tell me the difference between using "replace" and "update"?
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>I'm using regular VFP database (not MSSQL), I don't use views and usually, I open the tables with buffering mode 5.
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>I usually use "replace" and never got problem but I've seen other programmers using "update" and I would like to understand the difference, advantages and pitfalls of both commands.