>>Originally I had everything in DE. But the people I am doing this for asked me to make all the tables free and to use the USE command specifically. So I removed everything from the DE. And made the tables free standing so mutiple apps and/or projects could use them in the future.
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>PMFJI, but do you mean you freed them from a DBC? If so, just because a table is part of a DBC does not mean these tables can not be accesssed by different software now or in the future. The advantage of making your tables part of a DBC is enforcing data integrity. You can have stored procedures and RI with a DBC so everything is *contained* in the DB and not dependent on application code to enforce data business rules. This prevents users from hacking your data with something like MS Access and violating rules like primary key IDs, invalid State codes, fields that can not be null, etc. IMHO, by freeing the tables from a DBC, you will be accomplishing the exact opposite of what your customer *thinks* they are asking for.

Generally, third party libraries for other languages can not access tables associated with a DBC and have no understanding of rules and triggers. If you know of any that do, I would like to know about them. ODBC works to a degree, but the subset of the language supported is very limited.