While the rest of what you say may be true, this is not. And I agree it's not always simple.

In the initial SELECT, VFP may not have an advantage over anything else, but once the information is in a VFP cursor you are using VFP's native database engine and you have a rich data manipulation language. You can either continue to use SQL to address the cursor on a dataset level or you can switch to the old dBase language for record by record manipulation. Whichever suits your needs.

>>>but then VFP has a built in data handling language which is fast and >>extremely robust.
>
>This is only an advantage when the data is local.