>Actually, I didn't make the claim of performance increaes of 250 %, the book did. What I saw was a significant performance increase. It was enough to warrant using that solution because we did not have time to do a major rewrite and the company was not going to throw any more money into the network. The fact is the results were astounding, and I have yet to find a definative explanation for it, despite your excellent analysis.

Maybe this will put it into perspective:

Take the VFP EXE/Run-Time and strip out the IDE and all the GUI related commands/statements; what you wind up with is the "VFP ODBC Driver" (ie. a portable version of the VFP "data engine") with an ODBC API bolted on.

The only difference between the VFP ODBC driver and the native VFP data engine is that the ODBC "might" be doing some extra bachground fetching.

If the ODBC driver outperformed the "native" data engine it was a "fluke" and a review of the original code would have solved the problem (or simply rerunning the same set of samples a couple of times to allow for caching).