George,

>And Walter, adding unnecessary functions, such as MIN(), to an SQL statement unquestionably adds additional processing overhead. There's no question about it.

That's a highly overrated statement. As you'd know, the performance of a SQL query is highly determined by the (file) I/O. Since both described VFP SQL statements will cause exactly the same amount of file I/O (because the same records have to be read from the database) there should not be much difference. I've not done any extensive testing, but it would not surprise me that in a production environment the difference is not noticable at all.

To me this argument is total bogus, unless you can provide a real world example where it does make a significant difference.

IMO, This falls in the same category of 'common wisdom' that macro substitution is slow compared to EVAL() or name expressions. Performance wise, the differences between those strategies are insignificant. However, in certain situations, macro substitution might be hell lot faster than at least the EVAL function.

Walter,