>I rewrote my companies major product in VFP6 and now in VFP7 using the Stonefield Database toolkit and the DBC. I thought that by doing this the troubles that I had occasionally had in FoxDOS where sometimes postings to multiple tables would not complete posting would be a thing of past (records written in one table but not another). Think again! The problem remains, perhaps worse. I know that the records get written because they are wrapped in bullet proof transactions, but records just disappear. I am told that this is because of header or index problems, but the why of the thing makes little difference. To make matters worse, I am now rewriting an inhouse app not using the DBC and am finding that screens come up MUCH faster and that not having to worry about buffering etc makes the code much simpler. The 'Scatter Name' command is a great enhancement to 'scatter memvar' because it solves the scope problem. Without the DBC and Stonefield managing updates is more problematic but I had
>7 years of experience in DOS with doing that and have canned routines to handle just about every problem. I wish I had never heard the term 'primary key'. If I had a simple way to rip the DBC out of my app I would do it in a heartbeat. I would appreciate the views of others on this subject.

Calvin,
I don't see records disappearing problem (at least no more frequently than) with DBC or w/o DBC.
If you don't need persistent relationships, transactions, triggers, stored procedures, extended attributes etc then DBC is not a must. You could even mix the usage of free tables with DBC supported views and transactions. I honestly don't notice a load speed difference with DBC or free tables (but do not use frameworks or alike).
It wouldn't matter you heard PK or not, you were in fact using it since foxbase+ in some way.
DBC itself has some impact over table structures and indexes. All fields with their ordinal positions should match the DBC entries, all indexes defined should be there too vice versa. This means in any cases 2 tables should be in accordance (DBC and the table itself). But up to date I couldn't find a DBC related part of 'disappearing records'.
Buffering is a real enhancement IMHO. Honestly places where buffering is used were more resistant to corruption in my cases (BTW buffering is not dependant to DBC).
Cetin