>Conceptually, OLE-DB provider must be faster

Depends on what you're doing. The provider is faster with some things, slightly slower with others, or so it would seem.

> and scale better than ODBC driver.

It will scale much better than the ODBC driver. Despite what the docs said, the VFP ODBC driver was not thread-safe. The VFP OLE DB provider is free threaded, and scales quite well.