Thomas

>>But I cannot believe that the relatively simple structure of defined memory offsets
(easy to map from and to files) will have less efficieny when used with large amounts of data.

I can help there. dotNET is *definitely* troublesome in areas such as presentation reporting where large data is required. Resource gets gobbled at an alarming rate and "scalability" becomes a misnomer. Naturally pundits will advocate reporting at the database level, naturally without knowing enough about the need to actually comment on whether that is a viable solution, and this is indeed one of the ideas that have to be considered to overcome this scalability problem.

To an extent this can also be overcome by persuading customers that they can cope with much smaller chunks of data. However, I'd rather not be the one to tell a surgeon "you know how you've told us since 1995 that you need the department's 3500 outpatients on screen in a large scrollable grid with all their results at once so you can scan at a glance to prioritise who needs to be seen first, ordering the list by clicking column headers to allow you to juggle the various parameters. Well, great news; we've rewritten the app in a much better development environment, and the new tool is much better because it isn't designed for such large, inefficient collections of data, so from now on we'll give you the list of patients and you can just click one-by-one on the patients you actually need to see".

Also, in cases where (for example) a country is divided into several thousand separate cachments with distinct characteristics, a persistent indexed VFP lookup table/cursor is efficient and easy compared to repetitive backend selects or huge memory-resident collections. The lack of a local data engine- something that JVP has (naturally) scoffed at before but that I now see Rick Strahl is in agreement over- does cause far more twists and turns than the simple VFP cursor. I am aware of at least one vendor who also sees this and is frantically trying to put something together to allow persistent local data features similar to a cursor.

Regards

j.R