>That is actually very neat and eye-opening to me. I must say I've been limiting my thought to using XML to pass data to other systems, not within my own. I think I've been afraid of speed issues. How about speed? Is it just as fast to generate XML within the method and then parse it back out by the interface (for example), as it is to open a table or view? Then there's also the issue of the time involved in generating indexes.

You take a speed hit with XML, but if you are careful with the amount of data you are passing back and forth it is acceptable. Nothing will match the speed of pure VFP table processing though.

>If the speed is comparable, then is it ever feasible to just bypass the dbf altogether and save XML files as text, working exclusively with that?

I wouldn't go that far. XML can't take the place of a database. Think of it more as a method of passing data around than as a storage format.

Inside of your business object you will be still querying tables, but when you pass the data to your UI, convert it to text.

Some cool things of late, with SQL 2000, you can specify the result of a SQL query to to XML. No need to do the conversion yourself. I would like to see VFP7 have the ability to do this as well.