>We've heard it before and I've read all the threads. Just need to have it spelt out again.
>
>This week I have a meeting with a large customer (200 users) asking about our front end / back end etc. Currently, it's just VFP, no SQL Server. I'm worried that this may cost us the contract. Benefits of VFP: cost (customer) / no adaptation to software required (us). Benefits of SQL Server: encryption, ? reliability.
>
>We're not in a position right now to convert to SQL. I need to find some arguments though to convince them to use VFP and e.g. Hoblink JWT (www.hobsoft.com) (is like Citrix but then cheaper, works well) or Citrix. Using thin client I think would be faster than SQL Server anyway. Or, should we see the light, put all resources in creating a SQL Server back end and be done with it forever (well, for a while anyway)?
>
>I would be grateful for some opinions.
>
>Rene.

You may just have to bite the bullet and do both. Think about this one, one of the companies I work for bit the bullet and we "talk" to either VFP, SQL-Server or Oracle and use only one code set. We wrote a class called a query agent which allows us to create a cursor object to which we populate properties such as from, fields, where, etc. When a user logs in, they have an option to select which database (or databases) they want to connect to. The query agent receives the cursor object from the caller and creates a SQL string to get the data based on what database the user is connected to. This class is powerful enough to where we can actually connect to a database of each type and display 3 end-user queries, one from each database. But the real beauty of it is that we do this with one VFP code set. We even had Oracle consultants tell us that what we wanted to do couldn't be done.....guess we just couldn't take that for an answer.

Steve