George,

>Let me re-respond. I've just re-read my original post.
>
>What I meant, but may have not made clear.

>When you open an ISAM table to make an update, you may or may not be required to examine every record in that table in order to properly position the record pointer. The same thing applies when sending updates back to the table.

I suspect you're referring to a command like
REPLACE ALL field WITH Value FOR SomeExpression = Somecriteria

Then if the SomeExPression is fully optimizable only the needed records are called from the fileserver. If not, the whole table is scanned.

I think so far we agree.

SQL server accepts a :
UPDATE SomeTable SET Field WITH Value WHERE SomeExpression = Somecriteria

Here again, if the SomeExpression is fully optimizable only the records needed are retrieved from the database for updating. If not optimizable a whole tablescan is applied.

IOW There is no significant differency here, aside from the fact that a server DBMS always retrieves the records from a locally stored database and in the case if VFP the database can be stored on a remote file server.

This all has nothing to do with ISAM, but is rather an implementation issue of the DBMSs.

Walter,