Updating... In educating myself about ODBC, I am becoming doubtful about this working with just Metacard sockets. I *think* what I have ascertained is that each ODBC database (Oracle, Sybase, etc) uses it's own proprietary network protocol which is all hidden within their ODBC drivers. What happens is the ODBC manager on your platform (MacODBC for example) simply loads the drivers and calls methods in the driver, which in turn do all of the work over the network. So rather than writing sockets scripts, I think we would need to either a) Write something to access the ODBC manager on each platform b) Write our own ODBC manager which we can access from Metacard >From what I can see, Windows is the only platform with a real standard, stable ODBC manager but I'm guessing there is some good stuff for UNIX too. MacODBC appears to be very sketchy at best. This is still all slightly hazy to me, however. I found the source code to a UNIX ODBC manager here: ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/database/perl-interfaces/other/iODBC/iodbc-2.12.shar.Z It doesn't seem that bad, but it appears to be something which would require jumping into C to write an XCMD for Mac, DLL for Windows, and Xternal for UNIX- with some special code for each platform. Doable? I think so. But not as easy as I might have liked! Brian Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.