>>I have gone well above 200K records, and found that the TOTAL time to return ALL the records from the query was much faster in VFP. Unfortunately (or fortunately), none of my clients have ever asked to view 200K records at one time.
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>That's a good point and also an important distinction. In a data processsing environment that is primarily transaction oriented, having a powerful local database engine is likely not the highest-priority issue. However, rather than viewing records, what if you instead needed to do some kind of analysis on all 200K records and pull out a subset, then do another operation on that subset (plus other tables)to create another subset, etc? In a data analysis environment, VFP really shines. However, VFP might be the wrong tool for you.

I'm working on an app that does precisely the above..only with millions of records to start. VFP shines quite nicely. 200 K is just a blip on the screen.
I even have one screen with 3 grids on it all getting their views refreshed from a user supplied key. Happens quite fast despite the 4 tables these views are run against.....with nearly 1 million in the largest one....and that's a subset of the true data that I'm developing with. The key is optimized queries.

Steve