Yes it's intended behavior change documented in VFP8 help. It was discussed also recently on UT.

>Consider this
>
>With a table named mytable that has character, numeric, logical and memo fields
>
>

>cSQL = “SELECT * DISTINCT FROM mytable where field1 like ‘%hello%’ INTO CURSOR myquery”
>&cSQL
>

>
>in this case field1 is a character (50) field.
>
>It works on VFP 6 and 7 but in VFP8 it returns error 34 on the &cSQL line
>
>After toying with it a little I found that removing the clause DISTINCT from the command it works just fine in VFP 8
>
>

>cSQL = “SELECT * ROM mytable where field1 like ‘%hello%’ INTO CURSOR myquery”
>&cSQL
>

>
>So the questions are:
>
>Is this an intended behavior or is a bug?
>
>If it is intended how to avoid duplicate records on the result query?
>
>This was run under win2k with PIII 800 mhz and 500mb ram and the only applicatin running was VFP.