John

You can store Word docs as image fields or as text fields in SQL Server. If you use text fields you need to remember to alter the view field type to G or else your docs will always be zero length.

"Technically" you can also store blobs in varchars but size for word docs is almost always > 8K so it won't work.

FYI, SQL Server does not do as good a job with general fields as VFP local tables can do. In SQL6.5 you could lock up the client (or even the server!) by uploading big Word docs with embedded images into image fields. A word doc with an embedded scanned A4 page, for example, that worked fine in local tables, would reliably lock up with SQL Server when we tried it extensively in 1998. Not sure whether that was an ODBC issue or a server issue. I suspect that nobody believed a single table row could possibly be 100s of kb and some sort of buffer was being overrun.

Also FYI: since 1995 when we first did word docs with SQL Server, we've seen more and more instability with various versions of ODBC- the latest SQL ODBC driver reliably locks with Novell 4.x, for example. SQL7 seems OK but so far only 2 clients have it, the rest are still on 6.5.

you might also like to test under Win2000. For some reason, with pre-Word2000, using OLE for word docs seems to display incredibly slowly on Win2000 clients- well over a second with Word already open.

Finally FYI, this year we are moving the docs out of SQL Server aand placing them, nicely zipped, in nested folders in NT2000 that handles that beautifully. We're keeping HTML only in SQL Server. Plus, all transfer to the server is via HTTP. We did this to eliminate odbc from the client as it was a source of lots of probs with big records.

I'll happily share if you're interested.

What are you doing with these docs, by the way?

Regards

JR