>>>I just wonder how are the Access, Paradox, Clarion and other guys coping with this. I guess they also have their ways to hook into ODBC.
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>>AFAIK Access has had good integration with SQL Server for at least 10 years, dunno about the other guys.
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>Not so good. I've had to work with SQL data coming from several Access apps, and they simply don't seem to have a way (or the guys who wrote them didn't know how) to do SPT. This leads to creating loads of views for each occasion. They just seem to apply a wizard and live happily ever after not even having to notice it's not a Jet db in the background.
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>It's a good thing for them, they don't really have to do much work when switching, but I wouldn't call that integration. It's rather a bridge.

I did one project in Access about 10 years ago, to an MS SQL backend. Seemed to me at the time the whole idea was to shield users/devs from needing to know about SQL. There were several relatively easy ways to connect to MS SQL, IIRC ADP was one recommended option but for some reason we used DAO which also worked fine. Working against the SQL backend was about as easy as against the native Jet backend. Again, that was 10 or so years ago, I imagine integration has only gotten better since then.

Asking the Access users/devs for custom data/queries is probably the wrong way to go, again they may not know SQL. You might be better off giving them a VFP app and getting them to fill in user credentials and connection string info, to work against the SQL DB directly.