>>>>I can't say much about the replication, as I have not had a need to look at anything like it. But, I can ask you why you would consider moving your data to Access? Are you working with very small tables? I'm sure you are aware of the limitations that Access has with tables. I'm not being biased, Access does have its own purpose and niche, but it was never designed to handle large amounts of data.
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>>>My question to this is that even though Access has trouble dealing with large tables it doesn't mean it can't hold large tables. If I am accessing the Access data via ODBC in VFP and VFP is now dealing with the data and not Access, doesn't this problem go away? This way I combine Access97's replication with VFP's data handling.
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>>To my knowledge, the ODBC would merely be a translator for the Jet Engine. VFP would send a request through ODBC, the data would still be extracted in the same manner as the Jet engine. VFP would not be doing direct table level requests. Someone please correct me if I am wrong. But VFP through ODBC does not equal VFP performance. VFP gets its performance through a lower level of table manipulation than Access or similar programs.
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>I've haven't tested this yet with a large set of records yet but I did experiment by setting up a remote view of an Access database containing 300-400 records. The view came up very quickly (BROWSE window) and navigation and changes did not appear any slower than BROWSEing a local view. If my VFP front-end is doing all of it's work against the remote view I was under the impression that VFP's database engine is doing this. The only time the Jet Engine via ODBC would come into play is during such actions as REQUERY, TABLEUPDATE, etc. Am I incorrect in the assumption?

You are somewhat correct. I am not totally versed in ODBC low-level operations, but it is my knowledge that it's not necessarily the engine that slows down performance in this situation. An ODBC driver usually contains information regarding foreign table structures and index structures. Just because you are using VFP to access these structures via ODBC, does not mean that you will receive the VFP performance. As stated before, VFP gets its performance from its low-level table manipulation. When VFP has to manipulate data via ODBC for a foreign structure, it is not going to have the ability to perform optimized record movement, because every data request must first be translated for the particular foreign structure.