Regarding speed, I have not seen any significant differences. There is in fact a neat piece of information on the wiki about this:

http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~Client/ServerTechniquesPerformance~VFP


>Hi guys,
>
>I've got a Foxpro database that I'm going to pull information from and put into a single Oracle table. The Oracle computer is remote to the Foxpro computer. I need to just confirm one thing and ask one thing, please.
>
>Which is faster in general -- remote views or SQLCONNECT and SQLEXEC commands? I'm at a point where I could set up my import into Oracle in either fashion, depending on which is more efficient.
>
>No matter which way I jump, either with a remote view or with a SQLConnect, I'm going to need a DSN which means that the Oracle network client is going to have to be loaded on my Foxpro machine, right?
>
>Thanks in advance for the help!