>Hi Alan,
>
>you use SQL Server ?
>
>If yes, you read on BOL:
>

>The COLLATE clause can be applied only for the char, varchar, text, nchar, nvarchar, and ntext data types.
>

>
>This is not a arbitrary restriction because COLLATE have sense only for text info.
>
>On my example i want _TALLY return 1 because i want exact binary matching.
>
>Fabio

But _Tally does return 1. It seems like it's doing what you want when Collate is 'General'. I realise you want it to return 1 when collate is 'Machine', but in VFP, is a text string NULL-Terminated? As I understand, it is not. So when you add the Null-terminator, what is the string that VFP sees?

You may be right, and seeing what other people are saying about it seeming to be changed from version 6, at the very least it should be explained somewhere in "What's new" or in the help, but unfortunately, the help explanations are not very helpful for lots of stuff.

Alan