FoxPro is a text-based procedurally-oriented programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, MS Windows, Apple Macintosh, and UNIX.Although FoxPro is a Database Management System (DBMS) and it does support relationships between tables, it is not considered a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), lacking transactional processing.The final published release of FoxPro was 2.6, after which the name was changed to Visual FoxPro.

Although no longer sold or supported by Microsoft, there is still an active worldwide community of FoxPro users and programmers. FoxPro 2.6 for UNIX (FPU26) has even been successfully installed on Linux and FreeBSD using the Intel Binary Compatibility Standard (ibcs2) support library.

Version information

Operating system compatibility

Extant Versions by OS Version FP 2.0 FP 2.5 FP 2.6
MS-DOS Yes Yes Yes
Windows 3.1 to XP Yes Yes Yes
Macintosh No Yes Yes
SCO UNIX No No Yes
Linux & FreeBSD No No Yes[1]
Windows 2000 No No Yes

Technical aspects

FoxPro 2 was a major breakthrough, because of its "Rushmore" optimizing engine, which consisted of using indexes to accelerate data retrieval and updating. Rushmore technology examined every data-related statement, and looked for filter expressions. If one was used, it looked for an index matching the same expression.

In addition, FoxPro2 was originally built on WatCOM C++, which had its own memory extensor - at that time state-of-the-art. FoxPro2 could access expanded and extended memory, using almost all available RAM (DOS). It used some interrupts in absence of the extended memory driver: if no HIMEM.SYS was loaded, FoxPro enabled that mechanism.