Hi Kevin,

THANKS! This is exactly the kind of info I am looking for. (I also use views for updates, but SPT for lookups) I keep hearing that I should use SPs for updates but as yet am not comfortable with creating SPs that have 100+ parameters. <G> I'm probably missing something there.



>From my experience there are only a few things that have caused major issues with SQL*Server vs. Oracle vs. VFP backend independance (I use local and remote views quite extensively):
>
>1.) Oracle has no logical data type. You have to use numeric 1 or 0. I tried defining (or declaring public) TRUE/FALSE variables where TRUE = 1 in Oracle and TRUE = .t. for VFP/SQL*server. This works great in Oracle, but with VFP I had some data type issues, which caused me to write wrapper programs and/or bracket code.
>
>2.) Oracle has no 'multiple' memo or text fields. You have to use varchar2(2000) or varchar2(4000) fields which limits the amount of text in one field.
>

Does this mean you can only have one 'memo/text' field per record? That could mean some design changes, but no show stoppers there, as we generally limit our tables to one 'Notes' field anyway.


>3.) Having multiple memo fields and lots of other fields causes a remote view to bomb out at some size (as yet undetermined). To get around this condition, I did some splitting of large tables and reduced the varchar2() size for some fields in the Oracle schema. I would assume this is an ODBC issue, but I can't say for sure.
>
>4.) SQL syntax is different between SQL6.5/7.0/VFP/Oracle. You just have to work that out. I guess you could do lowest common denominator, but it only affected a few views so I didn't.

I'll probably need to figure out what the LCD is and then vary it when necessary.

This sounds like a Wiki topic in the making...