>I need a little bit of advice. I want to be able to query a database from a VFP 3.0 app. running on Windows NT 4.0 over a Novell 4.0 network. The only problem is that the database resides on a HP UNIX machine. I thought about programatically controlling a Telnet session to the UNIX box through a DDE interface but I don't know if this is the right way to go. Apart from that I can't find any documentation for DDE on the standard Windows Telnet app. > As was stated previously, a little more information here would help us to answer your question. I am able to query an Informix database on an HP UNIX server any time I please. I have VFP 3.0 sitting on my PC which runs Novell 3.11 and uses Novell's LAN Workplace for DOS to supply the niceties of a flavor of TCP/IP to get to the UNIX world. The important part though is the ODBC driver that I have loaded on my PC client to get me to "talk" to the Informix database. While I got my OPBC driver from Informix directly (so I could avoid fingerpointing in case problems came up), you can get those same drivers from companies such as Intersolv. See http://www.intersolv.com/ and look for references to their DataDirect drivers. Also, you will need the middleware stuff that Informix, Oracle, etc. require for you to have. Informix has I-Net, Oracle has SQL*Net, and I'm sure the others have similar unattractive names for their middleware. Once you have these items, you're ready to install. Of course, the DBA for the back-end database needs to give you permission to get to the database. But, if you are already able to login to it from a telnet or the like, you're already done from that end. The other possible gotcha (as it was on my PC) is to make sure the tcp/ip service has a reference to your back-end db engine in your local "hosts" file. I had everything set except for that when I went from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, and I could not see the error of my ways. It was very frustrating to know that what worked on Win3.11 did not work under the later technology. At any rate, I hope these thoughts help some.