CompuServe Messages

John, What you want to do with your CD will depend what you ought to have on it. Our requirement is that we run our programs directly off the CD. We will typically run reports from Louisiana today, Northern California tomorrow, Maine the next day, etc. In this kind of environment it is very important that you put all the files you will need for *both* Alpha4 and FoxPro 2.5 including indexes on the CD (if you intend to use both these products against your database). Someone else may want to use the CD as an archive storage medium for big databases (e.g. STF1 or STF3 from the Census). In that case you want to make the data as tiny as possible. When you decide to work with a particular set of records you can "Extract" them. This adds a step to process of generating your reports. If others will have to use this disc you will need to train them and document the "extract" step. And the process of specifying records to pull, running the extract program, and structuring the resulting output into a format you can use will take some amount of time. In some circumstances these issues pose no problem. In others they are critical. Also, for Census data I've found a company that is releasing STF1A and STF3A on a 4 CD set for $500. The CDs are arranged by region so that all the North Carolina data, e.g., is on the same CD. At that price I cannot afford to do it myself! Jeffrey William Gillette