Hi,
7 had a bug <g>. It should be fixed in 8.
Make a backup, try out VFP 9 on your data (reindexing everything).
For a quick check set enginebehaviour to 70
if it works as fast as before, there is a very good chance
it will work the same in vfp8 - and if you are datamining,
I'ld be hesitant to do that on a beta version <g>.
vfp8 is quite a good product, and via MSDN you'll get
nine later, so update cost is not that big a problem.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas