>>Thanks for the info. My company designed an application to track applicant information. When it first was proposed I said Access wouldn't be able to handle the workload. My prediction came true after a couple of months. Now they want to redesign it using Visual Basic. I believe they will use the jet engine again believing that Visual Basic is going to make a difference. Guess it's time to put my physic ability to work again.
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>Bill, you are in an interesting predicament because your company's strategy is probably being swayed as much by "internal" business factors as by technology factors.
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>I would like to suggest that you consider the ultimate size of your application's deployment. If it will eventually have many dozen or more users, you could do fine with VB as a front end and SQL-Server as the back end. Because of market-share and maintainenance issues to consider, VB is today a more politically correct way to go, and it actually does have a slightly more flexible GUI development environment. VB's RDO (Remote Data Object) capabilities make its C/S interface a bit more flexible than VFP, too, but not necessarily higher performance.
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>However, for a deployment that will be serving a LAN workgroup rather than an enterprise of 100's, you will be more productive and cost effective if you use VFP. The C/S capabilities of VFP are fine if you eventually need to upsize.
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>I personally prefer VFP because I love its speed, flexibility, and true OOP features.
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>I would NOT use Access. If VFP is not supported by your company, then I would go with VB/Jet/SQLServer.

Thanks for your input. The application in question will not have 100s of users rather thousands of records. Since VB uses the jet engine for it's data manipulation it isn't going to be any faster than Access was. Although VB/SQL Server is an excellent solution it would not be cost effective in this case.

My company is converting to Windows NT soon. I was able to convince my boss to order VFP 5.0 for the following reasons:

1) I have a 10 million record table I have to maintain for customer telephone no. lookup (It finds all occurences of a phone no. in less than 1 second)
2) I also have to do a report that takes in up to a 200,000 record file and converts it to a table, computes the amount of attempts per phone no as well as how many are in each time zone. This one takes about one minute to complete.

In this case, VFP is the best choice. There is no way on God's green earth that Access would even come close to this level of performance and my company will not buy SQL Server for this. And why should they. VFP is doing the job quite nicely.

After receiving my supervisor's permission, my next step was to talk to my regional support person. The conversation went like this:

Me: I need to find out how much VFP 5.0 costs?
Rep: Our company standard is Access.

I then explained the two scenarios above.

Rep: Oh okay, I'll find out for you and give you a call back.

So as I have mentioned in previous threads, the best way for us to market VFP is to demonstrate how effective it is at manipulating data. I'm just putting my "marketing strategy" to good use. People really don't know what the product can do simply because of Microsoft's past marketing efforts. I'm just doing my part to educate them as I'm sure the rest of you are.