>I am a newer programmer in VFP, I have a quick question regarding tables.
>
>What is the difference between free tables and those tables that are included in a database? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
>
>Thanks

Christine,

Free tables are a little easier to move around and copy and you don't have to worry about DBC corruption.

With tables in a DBC, you can have stored procedures, set persistent relations between tables, and set rules for handling events such as deleting a parent record and then requiring all children to be deleted as well. In addition, fields have PEMs for captions, validation, etc. Finally, the DBC is extensible which can give you some very neat features. For more info on this, check out www.stonefield.com/ and his technical paper on DBCX 2.

HTHs