>Having the connection opened has not the same effect as having a table opened. It all depends of the purpose of your actions. If I want to have only one user at a time working with given table I'm setting the TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL to SERIALIZABLE and then I execute any necessary SELECT and/or UPDATE/INSERT statements. What do you want to achieve holding the table opened all the time when application works?

The purpose is to retrieve the data as fast as possible. The situation is that 33% of the tables are opened permanently, when in VFP native table. If some of them are upgraded to SQL Server, I want to make sure we have as much power as we have now.