Excuse me for getting into this but here I am! Just a few comments below.

Tom


>>Walter,
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>>>Sure is that VFP is cheaper, a lot easier to install and maintain than SQL. If you don't have a high need for securing data and endurability of data then SQL might not be the most logical choice.
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>>I don't totally agree that SQL is harder to maintain than VFP. IMO, it's a on the contrary whether small or large volume of data. VFP Data Engine while it is powerful is somewhat a problem when it comes to maintenance. Not to do anything in its Indexes in a month will make your system suffer.

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One application we created for the medical field ran a delete index/ create index at an off time (0200) each day. By using SDT we had no down time due to data problems.
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>
>Rebalancing indexes is periodically needed to optimize performance indeed. However, With surrogate incrementing keys this more of a problem that with random generated, or mannually entered intelligent keys because balancing indexes would automaticly occur. This is also needed in other DBMSs, however most provide automatic balancing and/or clustered indexes. In most systems I develop a reindexing routine is a suitable solution.
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>>Aside from its FPT w/c vulnerable to corruption. It is not stable in handling binary data.
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>I never encoutered problems with this. AFAIK this is not a very common problem. There a lot of potential problem causing corruption, however you can do a lot to minimize the occurance of such problems. Using data buffering solved almost all data curruption problems I ever encountered. I've got about 100 systems with a few thousand users in the field for about three years now. Until today there has not been a single report of curruption of any kind in the database.
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>>With SQL-Server you can sleep as sound as you want. This is the very reason why we have 2 hospital system versions: VFP/SQL for high-end and VFP/VFP for low-end. The price of the first is more than twice higher than the price of the latter. And I always ask my boss not to promote the latter because of a lot of headache in maintaining its DB engine. VFP/VFP is just an option in a worst case scenario.

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SQL Server is not the "cure all" to data problems. If we go down it costs $10,000 a minute. We use SQL Server on all our data servers. We had SQL Server crash for no reason that could be determined on two occasions last year. We had to repair the problem and "get on with production". It is not nice to see 5000 people doing nothing and waiting for the database to be repaired.
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>Note that my statement was made on DMBSs like Oracle, SQL-server and MSDE, not on SQL-server specificly nor any of its versions. Personally I've had some headaches with MSDE. Suddenly, the database engine crashed and could not start up anymore. I tried reinstalling, examined the installation log, looked at MSDN etc, called the helpdesk, but could not solve the problem. Finally I had to reinstall Windows in order to make it work again. The conclusion I drew was that some dependency files must have been the problem.
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>With DBMSs like Oracle, SQL-server and MSDE, you need an administrator who knows what he's doing when maintaining the database: adjusting the database, applying security settings etc. Since server DBMS process all queries on the server it requires more tuning and knowledge to get performance optimal.



>With the VFP database, since all is processed on a workstation, performance tuning is much easier and can be predetermined by the developer of the software product.
>

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I have been to just about every Microsoft Kick Off. At the SQL Server 7.0 Kick Off, Steve Ballmer stated, "SQL Server 7.0 does not require an administrator"! I am still laughing! Our reality may not be the same as yours but come now, can there not be at least one exception to this marketing B.S.? Does anyone out there run SQL Server 7.0 or 2000 without an administrator? If so, what type of application, how many users and what is the purpose of the app?
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>One question tough, why is the SQL-server version as twice as expensive as the VFP version ? Only because of purchasing SQL and licences or is there another factor ?
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>>Now if you want to earn a living through Retainer's FEE, then stick to VFP/VFP combination.
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>Please explain ?
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>Walter,