>I can say it, from personal experience. The tests we ran on tables from 500K to 2 mil records performed retrieval of data on the order of 10+ times faster than SQL server.
>

Was the SQL data properly optimized? Were the queries on both sources exactly the same? Are you sure that the VFP data wasn't using filtered recordsets?

>What is more, the SQL syntax for SQL 7/2000 is not as functional as that contained in VFP 6.0

Of course VFP has all of its intrinsic methods available to its SQL syntax, and a few extra goodies like TO ARRAY and TO TABLE, but I don't really think that's a fair comparison. VFP is a programming language, TSQL is a query language with a few extra bells and whistles.