I am passing a SQL statement to VFP via ODBC and having some problems. Here is an example:

Insert into news (newsid,newstype,newscreated,newstext,headline,remove) values (5,"NEWS",datetime(),"This is the news today, not a lot has happened. Apart from a large meteorite hurtling towards earth, and the second coming of Christ in Rotherham. Oh, and that Mark winning the lottery, and never needing to do anything on a computer ever. John C Scott has nothing to add to this news story.","",datetime(9999,12,31,0,0))

This gives the following error:
ODBC Error Code = 37000 (Syntax error or access violation)
[Microsoft][ODBC Visual FoxPro Driver]Command contains unrecognized phrase/keyword.

However if I just cut the length of the text and then send exactly the same statement it works without error. Eg:

Insert into news (newsid,newstype,newscreated,newstext,headline,remove) values (5,"NEWS",datetime(),"This is the news today, not a lot has happened. Apart from a large meteorite hurtling towards earth, and the second coming of Christ in Rotherham.","",datetime(9999,12,31,0,0))

The only conclusion I can think of for the difference is that there is some limit to the number of characters which can be passed in the statement.

Does anyone know how many characters this limit is?
How I can go about increasing it?
Another way to submit this to the memo field without using ODBC?