Hey, all:

I have a chance to investigate a data conversion job. This would involve

importing from a flat file into FP tables, formatting/ massaging it, then

outputting it to another set of flat files. The company uses FPD (not sure

which version) instead of VFP because "FPD is faster". To give you an idea

of the size of the jobs involved, they take from ~1 hour to multiple days.

This causes me to ask some questions:

Would FPD really be faster for data conversion if you compared VFP under

Win9x/NT to FPD running on the same machine booted to DOS only? Does the

version of DOS make a significant difference? Does anyone have any hard

data, educated guesses or gut feelings about this?

Are there considerations besides speed (reliablility for example) to take

into consideration?

On a related note, has anyone clocked APPEND FROM... and COPY TO... against

low-level file commands?

I don't have to talk to these people for a couple of days and was curious

if anyone else had looked into these issues.

Any ideas?

Thanks:

Russ Scott

russsct@ix.netcom.com