I want to apologize in advance for anything that may be painfully obvious to most FM users. My question is this: Is it possible to execute an SQL statement on a FM 5.5 database from within the database. Here is my situation, I have been thrust into the DBA position with out much experience in FM. I am finding creating reports quite difficult. I do have experience in some other RDBMS like mySQL and Access. I think that if I could just execute SQL statements on the FM database I could generate the reports I need and shorten my learning curve. Is this possible?

It certainly is possible to execute SQL statements from within Filemaker Pro v 5.5. Basic info is in the "Getting Started" guide p31, more in the on-line Help.

Say you want to create new records in FM Pro and then send the values to an external ODBC compliant table. You first have to create a calculated field which contains the SQL statement incorporating values for each record. This is just a concatenation of the words and field names which make up the INSERT statement.

The statement is effected by creating a script which contains the step "Execute SQL". The dialogs let you specify the Datasource and the field in which the SQL statement is contained.

Hope this helps, but I personally think that it's better in the long run to get the hang of creating reports in FMPro.