Bhavbhuti,

I don't know of any database that handles completely arbitrary rows (ie every row can have a different column structure). Perhaps one of the pure Object databases can do this.

In a relational database like VFP or SQL you can use a memo type field to store an XML document.

Using this sort of scheme you can duplicate the functionality of the code you are talking about.

create table arbdata ( arbdatano i, xmldoc m nocptrans )
insert into arbdata values ( 1, xmldocumentformat1 )
insert into arbdata values ( 2, xmldocumentformat2 )

where xmldocumentformat1 and xmldocumentformat2 can be totally different structures.

xmldocumentformat1 :
<book>
   <author>Clarke Authur C.</author>
   <title>2001: A Space Odyssey</title>
</book

xmldocumentformat2 :
<album>
   <band>Moody Blues</band>
   <title>To Our Children's Children's Children</title>
   <songs>
      <song>
         <title>Higher And Higher</title>
         <author>Graeme Edge</author>
         <length>1:05</length>
      </song>
      <song>
         <title>Eyes Of A Child, Part 1</title>
         <author>John Lodge</author>
         <length>3:34</length>
      </song>
   </songs>
</album>

>Okay. Thanks for your help. What I was thinking is just that, will a DBC or for that matter any database Access, Oracle, FireBird, you name it. Are they / any capable of such field layouts, which I guess they are not, we have to rely on text type of documents.