What's a SQL Pass-through?

There are some odd things happening at this site that appear to be non-VFP related. Consider: It works on some, but not on all stations. It's persistent by station (it ALWAYS works on Sue's station but NEVER works on Donna's station). We've greatly simplified the views, but have not done much more because we ran into an interesting problem.

Novell 4. All users are administrators (no leveled security--all have rights to everything). They have to set up where the bridging DBF is in their Sybase program. They put in "F:\SOS\DATA\COMCLNT.DBF" but it can't find it. Says it doesn't exist. But it does. So we tried good ol' DOS with the following commands:
F:
CD\SOS\DATA
DIR COMCLNT.* (It finds it)

then:
F:
CD\
DIR COMCLNT.* /S (/S switch should scan subdirectories and find all incidences of that file, but it can't find it. Try it with other files, like the CLIENTS.DBF of my own VFP product, and it finds it with no problem.)

I don't know if this has anything to do with it or not, but I figured it was worth mentioning. While it has nothing to do with the SQL queries, I'm wondering if those core SQL files haven't been initialized or something, it will cause problems (it gets all of its data from COMCLNT on the initial load, but if it's not hooked up to COMCLNT, it can't). Late yesterday, however, we found that it can't scan for that file regardless of the workstation (in other words, it can't find it even on the stations that the program is working on).

Go figure.

Am working with the network people now so they admit there's an issue. Then they'll grant their presence to us on-site and I'll play with that SQL Pass-through thing, if you would enlighten me, please, Paul :)

Thanx!
JR

PS If it's too much to explain, if you could direct me to a book title, I'll take it from there--Thx


>>> Hmm..We're running 3COM 3c905B's (10/100's) on almost all of our machines. I'll have to see if I have a machine w/a different network card. I've just made a few more changes to my app and I'm going to try running it under NT to see if I have any better luck with it. I'm running Win 98 via a dial-up connection (not a LAN connection) as my test machine, but most of the real systems are Windows 95 connected via a LAN & WAN. I haven't see a difference between the two. Both of them seem to fail.
>>
>>Let me know what you find, and I'll do the same.
>>
>>JR
>
> Well, I've gotten my code to work but it's definitely not the easiest way to go. I still can't say what exactly was causing all the problems, though. I ended up dumping the views and using SQL Pass-Through to get it done. I had to simplify all of my queries to make it work OK. I had one query that needed to be broken up into five different pieces then assembled using the native VFP cursors. If you've got a lot of views, this might be a real problem. In that case, I'm still not sure what the answer is.