With ODBC your data processing is still being handled in the client memory space. That means dragging large amounts of data through the network to run a query. This is not a problem for SQL Server because it runs in it own process returning only result sets to the client.

If you don't want to use SQL Server then you can create a VFP COM server running on the server where the data resides. This way the queries will run in a seperate memory space. Use XML messaging to communicate with the COM server.

Charlie