Interesting use of CAST function, and thanks for comparison. This is great to know for changing the width of data, but the UNION select technique "fails", for example, when F1 is numeric - N(x,0) - and you want to cast as integer. By fails, I mean the resulting cursor comes back with a numeric field instead of integer. Primarily, CAST() was added to convert between data types.

>On VFP the new CAST() function it will more become one of the functions used in SQL SELECT.
>
>Sin that the Engine does not recognize the specificity of this function and that the reexecute the CAST for every record, degrading the performances.
>
>A simple example, CAST a C(1) to a C(2):
>

>*********
>
>CLEAR
>SET TALK OFF
>
>CREATE CURSOR myCursor ( f1 C(1))
>
>FOR K=1 TO 100000
>INSERT INTO myCursor VALUES ('a')
>NEXT
>
>FOR K=1 TO 10000000
>NEXT
>
>T1=SECONDS()
>
>SELECT CAST(F1 AS C(2) NULL) F2 INTO CURSOR R1 FROM myCursor
>
>? 'TIME :',SECONDS()-T1
>LIST STRUCTURE
>
>T1=SECONDS()
>
>SELECT CAST(F1 AS C(2) NULL) F2 INTO CURSOR R2 FROM myCursor WHERE .F.;
>UNION ALL ;
>SELECT F1 FROM myCursor
>
>? 'TIME :',SECONDS()-T1
>LIST STRUCTURE
>

>
>The second it is twice more fast.
>
>Fabio