Ok, I'm ready to get a slap in the face for saying this but...:o)
In my experience speed has been experienced in this order (slowest to fastest)

local views
remote views with good parameterization
VFP database with tables
VFP free tables
VFP free tables using scatter/gather from arrays

Obviously the fastest means is not designed for the future as the customer may have a future requirement for a secure backend and then is redevelopment time. But if you are only considering speed...

That is not counting all of the additional considerations such as cabling, NICS, hubs, routers, switches, bandwidth, memory, memory optimization, server capabilities, location of executable, location of temporary files...

Oh yeah, an update, lets not forget that the more OOP the slower it gets too...


>Victor,
>
>I understand (based on the title of the thread) that you are trying to help Fred begin to make a transition to client/server.
>
>Fred is trying to improve the performance of his application. Are you suggesting that by merely changing to remote views, and using ODBC to connect to VFP tables, he will get a performance gain?
>I ask because I've never tried that route. I would think it to be much slower.
>
>If he's having performance issues, there are other places to look first...such as proper Rushmore optimization, proper database design, proper SQL statement construction, retrieving only the relevant data, etc.
>
>It is possible that a close-to-total rewrite is needed to make fix these problems and move to client-server (if that is indeed necessary).
>
>>
>>Yeah you got the right idea. Make a 2nd database that has nothing in it except the remote views and the connection string. Now, when you decide you don't want to use those VFP tables, and use the SQL Server ones, just change the connection string in this 2nd database so that instead of using the VFP ODBC connection that points to your VFP database, it uses a SQL ODBC connection and points to the SQL Server tables.
>>I've done this several times and it works great - like I said just make sure the tables & fieldnames and fieldtypes all match.