I agree that SET ANSI ON sounds most reasonable, but in my case I don't get the performance I need without setting ANSI off. I hope it's something that I have not discovered yet.

>>My tests showed, much to my surprise, that LIKE was not optimized.
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>Our tests showed partial optimization for LIKE clause and full optimization for =. Now, I thought I read somewhere that VFP 9 has full optimizable LIKE, but I don't remember, where I read it, so do not know, if it's true.
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>I used SET ANSI OFF in order to use =, but I belive, it makes now everything not generic, since other back-ends use ANSI ON. So, it looks like I have to use LIKE clause if I want to easy switch back-end.
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>What do you think about this?
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>Thanks in advance.