Demetrius,

For what it's worth...

I developed in in-house app in Fox 2.6, and was asked to
"convert" it to Access. Let me say that the learning curve
moving to Access from 2.6 is no cake walk either. Also...

In the Fox 2.6 app, I had a search that took 1 input field,
did a literal string search on 4 fields to find potential
matching records in a table of about 3000 records. Fox 2.6
performed the search in about 6 seconds on a 486/66. In
Access I limited the search fields to 2 and on the same
machine, Access took approximately 20 seconds.

I haven't had much exposure to Delphi, so I can't offer much
help there.

Good Luck!

John