Comparing Two SQL Types

I do not know what interface it is that you are using and therefore know none of the functions you call, or their syntax. However, there are some things that appear obviously wrong or at least dubious to me nonetheless:

1. The very first line will already cause you trouble if SQLCHAR is defined as anything else but char [edit](removed irrelevant part)
I noticed though that in this case SQLCHAR is defined as unsigned, so, unfortunately, the cast is neccessary.[/edit]

2. What is that variable QUOTA you use to hold the function return values, and why is it named so horribly wrong?

Solution: if this is some kind of error code, name it error_code or similar, so that at least the puprpose of this variable is recognizable. In any case, do yourself and anyone else looking at the code a favor and use appropriate names for your variables. It really helps, and if ever you look at the code again in a couple of months, it will help you, too! And while you're at it - do yourself a favor and rename those other variables as well! Their purpose is totally unrecognizable from their name, and the code using them therefore is very hard to read!

3. Why don't you ever check the function return values? If you don't mean to check them, then there is no reason to store them in the first place! These values may be useful to detect error conditions - maybe you never manage to connect to the database because you didn't use the right parameter values? If so, there is no point to analyze your later problems! Or your query failed because you didn't define the query string correctly (see 1.) or you accidentally introduced a SQL syntax error? Again, if your query failed, there is no point in trying to continue!

Solution: Whenever there is a chance that a function fails, check the return values or whatever other things there are that indicate errors! At the very least your program should print out a message every time something unexpected happens, better yet you could throw an exception. In any case, if you set up a sequence of operations where each operation depends on the successful completion of all previous operations, do make sure that all operations are successful and don't try to perform subsequent operations if they are not!

4. SQLBindCol appears to be the function that binds your result variable chval1 to the result set. It looked odd to me for various reasons. So I looked up the documentation of this function, and it looks like this isn't quite correct:
- you defined the type of the result variables as character array, which is ok (apart from ... see 5.)
- You passed the array variable itself - I believe you must pass it's address instead, but I'm not sure. The reason I believe this is neccessary is that a result set may contain multiple results, and therefore the address must be usable as an address to an array of elements of the type defined in the previous parameter. So the type must be pointer to char array.
- I'm not sure if the value 128 is interpreted correctly either: if I'm correct about what I wrote above, then this number will be interpreted as the space available to store pointers (to char arrays), which is definitely wrong.

Unfortunately the documentation wasn't clear how to specify the size of individual char arrays within a result array of char arrays, or how to deal with that case at all, but this may not be relevant:

5. Why do you not use an integer result type instead? I know this was suggested before and you responded that you tried but needed a pointer, and only for that reason switched to a char array. I suspect that you didn't use the correct syntax. try:

SQLINTEGER chval1;
SQLBindCol(..., &chval1,1,&ret);

Thank you Stefan. I appreciate the comments. So from what I gather I don't even need to put QUOTA in front of the statements? I only did it because thats what the Microsoft example had. Also I have no idea how to check the return value of a function, it sounds like a good idea though. Right now with the change in the statement that I did, I no longer have to do any typecasting. The code is connecting to the Microsoft Access database and always returning the correct information. My little applet was done untill I had problems with my server always timing out, and short of paying mega bucks every month for a dedicated server, I decided to move the database to my local machine. This is just for a (POC) proof of concept.I had no idea that it would take so much, thus the recent flurry of questions. I only used chval1[128] because that was the only window I had open at the time. Although it was the wrong window it was a window, nontheless. So aside from learning a number of things, I have it working for now. Thank you for all of the wonderful information!