>> Have you used REFRESH() in a real life application?

FWIW, this is used the the Visual FoxExpress framework, so it's in my apps. :-) Basically, it allows you to requery just the record a user is currently working on. Consider a user working on a record and has modified a few fields and has performed a save. Refresh can be called just after the save to get any potential changes to the other fields (changes made by another user) since the last requery. Refresh may be better than a full requery in this case for performance reasons. After you call refresh function, you need to refresh the controls, of course. This way, the user is looking at the most recent data for all fields (not just the ones he has just changed).