Hi Martin,

This comes from a user who is not even going to try to use XML until either 'forced' to or it is all well settled-in...

Your advices below are all very sensible, but it would be interesting to know if these 'rules of thumb' (and others that I have seen stated along similar lines) are "official" in any way or purely based on experience.

If "official" then I'd say that XML's future is limited or, at the very least, these limitations are in need of becoming widely aware.
If based solely on experience, then I guess that you are communicating the 'present state of affairs' and their implications to developers.

cheers


>>I am very disappointed with that limitation of XMLTOCURSOR().
>
>Hi, Boban.
>
>That's ok, but take in consideration that this is not an XmlToCursor or VFP limitation, but a problem with the MSXML Parser. In general, XML technology is not geared to big documents. It is more oriented to small result sets.
>
>The problem here is that the XML Parser works by creating an XML Document in memory (a HUGE object in your case), so it takes lots of memory, and when real memory is not enough, it starts using virtual memory (swaping to disk) and then performance goes down completely.
>
>If you have a need to pass LARGE chunks of data, try to use another approach. If this is not an usual operation on your application, maybe you can resort to change just that. If this is normal, then you have to think about a different architecture.
>
>Anyway, if you are developing a client/server or n-tier application, work with such large recordsets is not recommended (except for very particular operations, like importing or exporting big files to another system, for example).
>
>Hope this helps,