I have an application that was written for me by a programmer who represented VFP as the "best thing since sliced bread" and that would be robust for many years in the future and more importantly handle huge customer databases over a LAN instantly. Now, after two years the server based program is as fast as a three legged horse over a network and what used to be 1 to 2 second response times to open a customer file is now 30 seconds + because he must first download these huge databases (maybe 20 to 30 thousand customers) to the workstation first and then process the action.

I have been told .NET would solve my problem in conjuction to having SQL as the database. I "don't speak Greek" and don't understand there isn't an easier fix then to convert the VFP program to .NET with SQL for a whole bunch of money too.

Any comments from anyone.

Thanks,
Marc

Sounds like a bad design to me. I am not familiar with foxpro but i would say that it is stupid to have to download the whole data base for any look up. it defeats the point of having a server. you might as well have every work station keep there own records and propage changes one at a time. It would be less bandwidth. In addition foxpro has been discontinued. Support will continue until 2015 but ms-sql support will be going long past that. I don't know the situation to well, but i would say that you can't ever go wrong with a real data base. Of course it might be that you just need to maintain your existing database. Rebuild indexes and such. Are you really sure that the whole database is downloaded just to get one customer record!?!?

I'm not sure how VFP works internally, but a move to .NET should be viewed with caution. My experience with databases is limited to MySQL and I have never come across a situation where it will not perform amazingly. Visit their site to see what companies are using it - you will be surprised.

My experience with .NET is that it probably works very well IFF (If and only If) every other computer / device you will be contacting is also on a .NET framework. From a programming point of view, I tried to get a Linux server talking to a .NET client and vice versa using SOAP. What a nightmare, and it never did work.

My advice would be to migrate the data to a more current database engine.