Hi Feches,

FoxPro applications can work with either FoxPro tables, Microsoft SQL
Server, or any other database accessible through ODBC or OLE DB compliant.
In other words, FoxPro and Visual Basic work very similarly against a SQL
Server back end.

FoxPro tables are a file-server database. The only security on that data is
via the Windows domain. SQL Server, Oracle, etc. have true security in that
you can grant users access to specific objects.

Fifty users is not many for FoxPro and of course not many for SQL Server. As
for your users being in several locations, the stability of your network
will be an issue since losing connections while FoxPro tables are open risks
corruption to the tables. (I've only had 2 or 3 incidences of corruption in
8 years, and all were recoverable.)

As for Security, FoxPro is a file-server database so the only security is
that granted by the Domain to the directory where the data resides. SQL
Server has a much more robust security model.

If you want to convince the boss of using SQL Server then cite stability and
security. If you need to argue VB versus VFP for the front end then I'd say
they were about equal.

SQL Server gives you potential scalability and high availability benefits.
For example you can backup a SQL database while online and it is
cluster-aware in a failover cluster. Cindy has already mentioned the
security advantages of SQL Server. A 50 user installation is quite a small
load for either product. Unless 24/7 availability or security is especially
important to you I'd say that the choice of database platform was relatively
unimportant (as long as it's not Access!) and that the user features of the
application should have much more weight in your boss's decision.