could you guys kindly please stop it? i'm no fan of M$, and i like postgresql a lot, but face facts here. the guy is proposing a major migration of his desktops. no sane IT shop would simultaneously migrate an entire database infrastructure. what he needs are working ODBC or JDBC drivers so the apps on the linux desktops can talk to M$ SQL Server, nothing more and nothing less. both options should work; he didn't give enough information about his desktop App to really suggest which he needed. PostgreSQL and MySQL may not even meet the needs of said IT shop, none of you have any idea what their schemas or SQL look like. i've dabbled in Oracle->PostgreSQL migration before, and it can be pretty challenging if certain "features" were used by the Oracle developers. MS SQL Server-> <some Open Source DB> is likely to be every bit as challenging, so it's pretty silly to propose it in this case. this flame war is a real waste of bandwidth. sheesh, richard -- Richard Welty rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592 Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security