John,

Excellent points...I just wanted to clarify something about one portion of your post:

>My guess is that your folks look at robustness in terms of size of data and security. Access has security, but it falls short on size. Fox falls short on size and has no security.

While it is true that Fox falls short on fairly large sizes (yes, I know this is all relative) because of the 2GB limit, the way the above is stated would assert that Fox falls short on size in much the same way that Access falls short on size. In fact, on the face of the above verbage, it would make Fox appear inferior to Access, since it "falls short on size and has no security".

There are folks out there who store amounts of data somewhere between the 50,000 records where Access chokes and the hundreds of thousands that Fox can handle. In both my last job and this job, there have been very distinct reasons for using Foxpro, and they aren't all that uncommon. I can elaborate if you wish, but suffice it to say that not everyone has the money or resources to fund a SQL Server data store, and some applications (like distributed apps) require a client-side data store for which Fox fits the bill perfectly.

Sorry to jump in, just wanted to make clear that while Fox does have size limitations, those limitations are very acceptable for a lot of uses, and the limitations are _far_ less limiting than the debilitating performance of Access when only tens of thousands of records are involved.

That being said, in a larger corporation that probably already has SQL Server running (thus staff and resources have already been committed), I agree that Fox should not even try to compete with the security and scalability that a backend server can offer -- there would simply be no reason for it.

Thanks,
JoeK