Question : Database Advise

Hello,
I am need of some advice. Our company's point of sale system uses what appears to be a Dbase database. I have been given the task to create some custom reports that tie into the point of sale system. I was told that it was SQL compliant.

What I have done so far, I created an ODBC connection using the standard Windows ODBC as well as we have purchased an ODBC driver from a company called DataDirect. When I do a basic query in either Access or MSQuery (using Excel) I will get the records I need but occasionally I will get what almost looks like corrupt data. In MSQuery I would occasionally get duplicate records. In Access when looking at the raw data some records would be completely wrong yet when I did a second query based off the first query the results would post fine??? It's almost like the ODBC drivers don't work right or that the data is corrupt. Though through the point of sale system it appears just fine. This has left me baffled. Ideally since our reports are all a day behind anyways I would like to create a data dump each night to another database source and then run all our report off of that. Kind of like a mirror. Can someone help me figure out what the best approach would be where the data isn't acting strange (duplicates, wrong values etc..)?

Thanks again for your time.
Jester

Answer : Database Advise

If your data retrieved via ODBC driver looks scrambled or duplicate once but everything is OK at the second attempt then it points either to ODBC driver or you may query data which are not in "stable state" means just in process of creation, having problems in index etc. You should try to copy your data when the point of sale system is inactive and work on these copy.

If this behavior appears in both ODBC drivers used then you may try Microsoft Visual FoxPro ODBC driver which allows to query DBF data, as well.