>Well, our client base is relatively small, the oil and gas transmission/distribution pipeline industry, and drive our business on a pretty straight course. We are getting feed back from our client representatives that the IT departments of these companies ( and in the end they have a large part part in approving the purchase of our software as the user are laymen, no offense intended to them ) are advising our buyers to stay away from VFP. Their concerns are stability and overall client/server performance. We ( the developers ) have met with a subset of the client IT departments and no amount of facts, rumors, demos, preaching would make them sway their opinion we need to change. So lest we change in the next couple of years we may have a problem. Our biggest competitor are in-house developers from those same IT departments. We are looking for a solution that allows us to maintain the affordability of our package. We don't want to buy SQL Server license(s) and our smaller clients don't
>want to either. The clients don't want the MSDE part of SQL Server, nor do we, and we need a local database because our package is designed to run in the field off a network.

As a local database engine, Fox is hard to beat, although in some IT departments, the inferior JET may be more politically correct. Most of the commercial VFP frameworks offer strategies for targeting both client/server and local databases. Our market is composed mostly of smaller clients, so that is what we do. If your market will be primarily client/server, the VFP OLE DB provider is available for your smaller clients.