First - it sounds like you know what you're talking about and that you really care about the quality of your solutions and your clients' operations.

Regarding JVP - he is right about much of the time (not all, JVP!)! His argument that stored procedures and pass through cursors make for a faster VFP/SQL implementation is right on!

I'm not interested in that part of the Market that specifies SQL when Access or DBF's will do the job. Let thenm do it in house or hire through a programmer farm agency. But I do work with existing backends when required. I will specify SQL when it is required. But the argument that all VFP solutions should be SQL (when 90% of the market does not need SQL) is difficult for me to agree with.

And ACCPAC is a great accounting package - and - I've integrated VFP with ACCPAC and ABBRA. Integrating with off the shelf packages, especially ones as reliable as ACCPAC is a good idea and a good skill to have. I do not believe in re-inventing a wheel if the one on the cart is rolling. IOW: New technology [simply] for New Technologies sake is not something we should pitch. I alwys ask why the client want to change tools if the one they have seems to be doing the job.

> A 4 million record table that slows down a 10 user network, will bring a 50 or 100 user system to a grinding halt.
>

I would ask why a 4,000,000 record table?
>
>You say that MS SQL is clumbsy
It's not clumsey - buy only a small fraction of the market actually requires it.
>
but yet fail to address the fact that if anyone is in a VFP table you are severely limited in what you can do to manage and maintain tables. On a large network, nothing is more clumsy than kicking all the users out of a system to do what would be considered mundane database maintenance.
>
Some of the more profitable databases in the world shutdown once a week for an hour just to do maintenance. If table data is normalized and well designed, maintenance could be very infrequent.


>Also lets not forget that Microsoft includes FREE distributable MSDE with VFP. It's possible to deploy at low cost to the client but offers many of the security and reliability advantages of the full blown MS SQL.

But why, when VFP tables will manage the solution just as well?