>Kevin,
>
>Thanks very much for going to this trouble. It is certainly appreciated.
>
>It all looks very reasonable. At the risk of sounding pedantic: you might very well increase VFP's performance for the larger resultsets if you SELECT gender the same way as you do in the C# version- i.e. SELECT just the value- and display the expression in the UI. However, that is possibly taking optimization too far- both versions already seem to yield acceptable performance to create a combined dataset for subsequent reporting.

Yes, my original intention was never to start a full-blown competition, I was interested to see how C# stacked up, I was never expecting it to be faster, but what I did find was as you said, acceptable performance.

In fact, the only time C# crumbled was with a first-time query, as you can see it halves the time after that.

I would love to also hear some suggestions on some data-crunching, perhaps I could do something more after each query, see how much difference there is in data-manipulation, I've heard .Net was awful in comparison to VFP, well lets have a look, I'd be very interested.

Thanks