Hi, Greg.

[snip]
>I've also found that when you get over about 50 million records that VFP can be slow even doing a USE (table)... Just a few months ago I fixed a VFP app that was taking users 5-10 minutes just to get into the program. Come to find out every workstation was opening a 10 million record 'temporary' file when the program launched. Once I deleted and packed the table the app opened right up.
[snip]

Just wanted to point out that my own experience showed me that it is not plain record count what slow things down, but having too many deleted records. The delay at USEing the table can be prevented with proper indexes on deleted(), as it is caused basically because a scan is needed to find the first non-deleted record.

All in all, I had tables with more than 30 million records and searches were pretty fast (not only VFP searches, but phDBase searches also).

However, in the end, for such intensive DB work, SQL Server or another relational engine is the solution. Since a few years ago, I use DBFs just for very small tasks, or some very little apps I wrote for non-profit orgs.

My .02,