>My customer wants me to develop a VFP6 application which uses Pervasive SQL
>to store the database (over ODBC).

I partly agree with Craig. Although Pervasive is based on older technology, it has been substantially improved and modernized with time. A lot of commercial applications, such as accounting systems, use it as their database engine. It's stable and a lot cheaper than SQL Server or Oracle. There are several downsides, however:

- Pervasive doesn't support DSN-less connections, so you have to create ODBC data sources on every workstation.

- Since it isn't as well-known, you'll find it more difficult to find others with experience or to get support for Pervasive than for SQL Server or Oracle.

- Pervasive is very slow when it comes to doing joins. In fact, it's a lot faster to use SQLEXEC to get individual tables from Pervasive and then join the cursors yourself than it is to ask Pervasive to join tables.

So, if you cannot use VFP tables, have a tight budget, and can live with the limitations of Pervasive, then it should work OK for you. It's easy to access from VFP using SQL passthrough functions or remote views.

Doug