>>>Your DBC read-only, ie included in the compiled version?
>>Yes. Opened exclusive, re-created from scratch. We are usinf VFP 3.0 though if that makes any difference. Could'nt find anything in Help which remotely suggests that the use of this command is restricted.
>Sanjay,
>
>If the DBC is marked Included in the project, that is it doesn;t have the little circle with a slash through it in the PM. Then the DBC is read only adn the view cannot be created because the view definiton has to be written into the dbc.
>
>Mark the DBC as exlcuded formt eh project, highlight it and choose exlcude from the Project menu. The build you exe and be sure to distribute the dbc dct and dcx along with the exe.

Thanks Jim.
The DBC is not included in the PM. However, I did work it out in the end, although, it is not a solution, just a work around . Since my SQL was very large involving four tables with loads of fields, each field prefixed with the owning table name, it seems that somehow VFP was cartwheeling in memory handling that. I simply used four aliases (a,b,c,d) for the four tables so that VFP only, it seems, had to do the conversion once in the FROM declaration. It worked!

Sanjay