Microsoft Access compared to Visual FoxPro

The design philosophy differences are dramatic and not to be underrated.

Microsoft Access, the database in Office, is the most broadly used and easiest-to-learn database tool that Microsoft offers, or if you want an interactive product with plenty of convenience, then choose Microsoft Access.

The two products feel quite different. Access is very intuitive and easy to use at first. But as the application becomes more complex, the programmer ends up fighting with Access. It wants to do things one-way and the programmer needs to do it a different way.

Visual FoxPro is a professional developer tool. As an example, tinkering under the covers of a master-detail form is nearly impossible in Access, whereas it is a breeze in FoxPro. The Access database uses variable length records. This is fine for small data files, but as the number of records grows, navigation becomes slower.  Access locks the entire page when a row is updated, whereas FoxPro would only lock that row. Many users updating records that are physically near each other could lead to a performance advantage for FoxPro.  

As a client/server development tool, Visual FoxPro is easier, more problems oriented, more capable, offers better cursor and connection control, and has native SQL.

Visual FoxPro is a powerful rapid application development (RAD) tool for creating relational database applications. If you are a database developer who builds applications for a living and you want ultimate speed and power, then choose Visual FoxPro.

Microsoft SQL Server compared to Visual FoxPro

Microsoft does not contrast Visual FoxPro versus SQL Server. They position SQL Server as a database engine and Visual FoxPro as a developer tool. While Visual FoxPro has a database engine built-in, it is not positioned as a stand-alone database engine only. The trend is for an increasing amount of Visual FoxPro based applications to use SQL Server as the data storage in the solution. Of course this is not required, it depends on the requirements of the solution. SQL Server offers security, reliability, replication, and many other features of a full relational database engine while the Visual FoxPro database system is an open file based DBF system.

FoxPro is the best front end to SQL Server to use for development. Because it's got its own data engine, it lets you do things that are extremely difficult in SQL Server. FoxPro gets SQL Server data down in the memory cursor.  FoxPro as the user-interface and Microsoft SQL Server as the backend is the best choice when the solution is based around a high volume of mission-critical transactions (for example, banking, 911 calls, and so forth).