>Excellent point Al!
>
>We cannot presume anything as developers. Communications (in writing) is sometimes required to protect yourself and others. We had one client that had an Oracle db and we had to interface an inventory/shipping application into. We were given the schema of one table that we could access. A demon would hit our table and cause an update to their systems. This was an application for a large international company. Companies value their data and security.
>
>Sometimes the corporate dba will own the data and other times no one knows who owns what. :)

Hi Tom,

I'm giving this a lot of thought, but the developers are working for my client, the data is my client's (this is the only thing I have no doubts about), and I'm working for my client too.

If my client was to tell me that there is a protocol to follow in this instance, things would be different (been there with another client), but in this case we both agree that he needs to look at the structure in order to determine if things are going in the right direction.

Until yesterday, the other developers shouldn't have had any qualms about giving the information to my client as I was completely out of the picture.

From the way things have evolved, I have a very strong feeling that they have reason(s) to believe that granting my client's request may be detrimental to them.

I say until yesterday, because yesterday I saw a demo of their work and there were gaping holes if you consider that they have spent over 5 months just DESIGNING the system (i.e. not writing a single line of code).

The person in charge of project management and design has been giving just trickles of information to his developers (sub-contractors) and this was evident yesterday from the demo and discussions with one of the developers.

Thanks for your input!

Alex