My understanding from reading various reports and comments is that Jet
starts to grid to a halt when you have very large databases >100,000
records plus.

These days you may find that you cant provide all the facilities you
require in a corporate solution fro a single product.  You may find
that an combination of SQL server for full scale data storage, and or
FOX for local/smaller data data and manipulation and VB for user
interaction provides the optimum solution.

Check out Visual Studio Enterprise Edition which includes:

Visual Basic, Visual C++,Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, Visual Interdev,
Visual Sourcesafe,and for NT Visual Transaction Server and SQL Server.

It is availble for a fraction of the price you would pay to buy each
product separately and even if you dont immediately use all its
components it is still worth while.

Note: the email address supplied above has been altered
to help reduce junk e-mails.  Remove the underscores before
replying if you wish to send me a genuine e-mail

Posted this over labor day weekend and got almost no replies.
Can anybody help me with this?

... 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