Charlie,

>> I don't think VFP drags the entire table down the wire to run a query. It's mostly index data. Does anyone want to comment on this?

I may be mistaken, but I think that if you try to open a table using the USE command you automatically load the entier table into your workstations memory (physical RAM/SAWP Memory).

Now if I execute the following query:

SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS

without previously loading the CUSTOMERS TABLE using the USE command, I could have access to the entire data set by executing the following command :

SELECT CUSTOMERS
BROWSE

note: No indexes necesary in customers table.

Now, the part were I may be confused is on how VFP may load this data without having to pass thru the wire.

Please correct me on this If I have something wrong.
Thanks in advance. :)

>> Also, having a VFP application running on server (COM app) will allow queries to run in a seperate process like SQL Server. This is a very cost effective option for VFP apps running on WAN. Also, you have the benefit of VFP for data access, which IMO, is more flexible that T-SQL.

This is a cost effective option, But I partically perfer to go with some of the big boys in the Database business for large corporate apps due to the amount of resources they invest every year on making these products work more efficiently. I can't see my shop investing the amount of resources MS or Oracle invest on these database technologies. Besides I dont think US$ 2500.00 for MSSQL Server could hurt your budget to much when providing a WAN solution, and if it does MSDE could be considered.

I also won't have to worry about limitations such as the 2GB table size VFP data has.

My 2 cents.