Thanks a lot guys, for your replies and very interesting points of view. So far in my testing, I haven't had problems retrieving data by using the persistent relationship that I've set on my forms. But some of the opinions I've read I have to take them really seriously, because I cannot jeopardize the performance in speed of the transactions the system will be handling. We expect to have between 40-80 users using base tables of 500,000+ records and a volume of about 500-1000 transactions a day. The relationships that I've set so far do have a degree of complexity when taking into account the number of tables connected, not to mention the presence of other lookup tables. I'll take into consideration all of your opinions and decide which one would be the most favorable for me. So far I tend to believe that setting relationships as I need them and using seek() when required would be the wiser way to do it. If you have any extra comments, please post them, they are greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

Happy Easter,

Gil

>>In my database designer I'm assigning relationships between all the primaries keys in my tables, that then I drag onto the forms I'll be using. My boss, who knows some VFP says they are not truly reliable and that it's better to create your own as you go. What do you guys think?
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>It depends on how complicated your relationships are. I discovered the hard way that you cannot have persistent relationships between one parent table and many children table.
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>Example:
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>In my database designer, I have ParentTable, ChildTable1, ChildTable2, and ChildTable3. These tables all have the same primary key, and there is a 1:1 relation between ParentTable and ChildTable1, between ParentTable and ChildTable2, and between ParentTable and ChildTable3 (One of my fellow developers thought it would be better to have four small tables rather than one big one). I was able to establish this persistent relationship in the database designer.
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>However, when I put these tables into my form's data environment, the relationship between ParentTable and ChildTable1 comes over, but the one between ParentTable and childTable2 and between ParentTable and ChildTable3 does NOT come along. The data environment won't let me create the relationship visually either. I was forced to remove the relationship between ParentTable and ChildTable1 in my data environment, and then create all the relationships with code (SET RELATION..., SET SKIP...) in the data enviornment's Init method.
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>Later, I had the same problem when there was a true 1:m relationship between a parent table and two child tables. One of the relationships came over, but the other did not. I had to remove the one that came over before creating the other relationship through code.
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>Caveat hacker,
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>Bill