The stuff I am talking about is with VFP8 data only, no MSSQL in the mix.

I would have thought you'd say "1" was a better option. Sinde you're saying "3" I'll have to take a closer look at speed and ease of coding between doing "stored procedures" in a .cs data class as opposed to doing them in a DBC. My knee-jerk thoughts were that creating datatables in memory was "not as good" a CREATE CURSOR(), but knee-jerk isn't always the best way to develop.... :)