Hello, First let me say that I'm honored to be posting to such a distinguished list of HP 3000 professionals. Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated! It looks like we are going to start up a project to use ODBC and IMAGE/SQL to allow our new shop-floor machine controller software (called WonderWare) to talk to our IMAGE databases. The goal is to further automate the flow of product through our plant by allowing the machines to automatically upload quality and process data to the HP 3000 and receive any needed data (such as new lot numbers, process data from other machines, etc.) from the HP. So far, it looks feasible. We have been writing test programs in Visual Basic to execute various queries in IMAGE/SQL via ODBC, and preliminary performance and resource usage data looks good. My question is, most broadly, are we heading into totally uncharted territory? The implementation that we are proposing is (pardon the buzzwords) mission-critical and enterprise-wide. It needs to work well, and all the time! Is this too much to expect? Does anyone have any experience with anything like this? Remember, I'm not talking about pulling some records from a detail dataset into an Excel spreadsheet; I'm talking about consistent, robust, two-way communication. If anyone has any advice about potential pitfalls or appropriate ways to proceed, please share! Many thanks, David Criswell Sumitomo Electric Lightwave Corp. [log in to unmask]