>I am writing a small gradebook app that will be distributed widely and needs to be almost bomb proof. In this case, could free tables be a better choice than tables in a DBC since I don't need long names or stored procedures? What is the downside?

There was a discussion about this on the ProFox list recently. (You can search the archives at http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox) Here's what Ed Leafe had to say:

"Subject: Re: Confused about views
Author: Ed Leafe
Posted: 2002/12/30 at 10:33:00


On Monday, December 30, 2002, at 10:14 AM, Brian Abbott wrote:

> ... This sort of thing is likely to happen with any vfp (indeed to a greater or lesser extent any database) application if you have the sort of power problems you describe. Solution is simple: tell them they _must_ spend money on UPS. And if they are cheapskate enough to refuse, do you really want them as a customer?

It's not a problem of the framework as much as it is a problem of frequent writing to the table. The move to views is a huge step in the right direction. I had a client whose software was installed on their client's systems, and thus they couldn't control things such as the quality of electrical service, etc. They too were troubled by frequent calls to deal with corrupt data as a result. My first change when I came on board was to switch from direct table editing to views with discreet updates back to the table. Remember, corruption can only occur
during a write operation. Having the data edited in memory cannot corrupt the copy on disk. By switching to views, the window where corruption could occur was reduced dramatically, and so did the corruption suppport calls.

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Ed Leafe
http://leafe.com/
http://foxcentral.net