Sorry for the length of this posting, but if you are familiar with both
Visual Foxpro and Jet 3.5, I really could use your help.  Let me say first
and foremost that I'm not trying to get into a religious war... I'm just
seeking information to help my company make the best possible decisions.

My company has developed some products in VFP that serve as analytical,
decision-support tools for healthcare professionals. By necessity, these
apps interactively crunch LOTS of data... they demand very fast, complex,
multi-table analytical operations. Our top management is delighted with the
features, performance, and look/feel of our products. However, at the same
time, they have little appreciation for function when it clashes with
business objectives like developing our products with market-share,
well-accepted tools such as VB5.

Thus, I am trying to research an elusive comparison between VFP and VB/Jet.
Specifically, when you compare VFP's database engine against Jet 3.5, which
one is superior in terms of performance and flexibility? In particular, we
need to know the power/speed of Jet insofar as its ability to handle fast
lookups on indexed multi-million record files, its ability to support
programmatic creation, manipulation, and discarding of innumerable
temporary read/write tables, and also its ability to provide very flexible,
near instantaneous manipulations of multiple, interrelated tables that
might have between 1000 and 100,000 records each.

For example, in VFP it's easy and extremely fast to do a couple of
pass-through queries, then create an index on each resultant client-side
cursor and relate the resultant cursors on a common index expression (not
necessarily related on a static field, but rather related on an
expression... very important!).  One can make the cursors read-write with a
single statement. One can then "walk the indices" of these two (or more)
"related" cursors and do all kinds of powerful analytics, manipulations,
and lookups nearly instantaneously. Many of these analytics and
manipulations go far beyond what one can do with SQL alone.  Then, with an
additional statement, one can flip any records of interest into a permanent
table or export them into an Excel file, etc. This is nirvanna for us
insofar as meeting our functional objectives.

Can Jet 3.5 support these kinds of operations, and do it really fast?  What
about flexibility?  From what I've read, it seems that Jet might impose
some show-stopping obstacles when it comes to supporting read/write cursors
derived from SQL pass-through queries and the like.  Is this easy to work
around?

Thanks very much!!! If any VFP/Jet gurus out there would like to discuss
this further in real time, I would love the opportunity to do so... on my
dime.

- Mark S. Frank

Mark,
        I thought the VFP engine was available ? Jet is only one of the ways of
handling data from VB5. Why are you assuming that using VB5 will mean using
Jet ? Not trying to be sarcastic, just wondering.
--
Kenneth Tyler, Outformations, Inc. Berkeley CA
...> My company has developed some products in VFP that serve as
analytical,

Ken, VFP's engine is only available to VB via OLE automation, as far as I
know.  The fundamental question we are grappling with is "What is the best
application development tool for the job at hand?".  In a nutshell, the job
at hand require some client-server connectivity, but the most important
criterion is the capability to rapidly and interactively perform intensive
analytics on numerous interrelated desktop recordsets, most of which are
intermediate tables generated within a sequence of analytical steps, that
initially are obtained from either remote or local sources (or both).  The
analyses that we perform go substantially beyond the set-based capabilities
of SQL alone.