I now responsible for an existing multi-user VFP application (currently VFP 5, willing to use newer versions). Tables are on a server (Novel).
It opens all the tables when the application starts (a hold over from original FPW opplication), it uses private data sessions for data entry forms. Recent a user crashed and I think this currupted a few tables but adding an empty record which caused the part of creates the keys to restart at 1 and thus create duplicate records. I was able to fix this by deleting bad records, but this may have caused some counts in other tables to be bad.

I do not want to be in the table repair bussiness and thus would like to avoid situations like this. Any suggestions appreciated.

One thought I had to minimize potentail bad records is NOT open the tables when application starts but only when data is being added or updated. Is this a viable approach?

What is the overhead?
How do I code this efficiently?

FWIW it uses SDT.