Suggestions for large ODBC Project

[BrentHedden]

I've finally got some free time to work on an ODBC project that I've been meaning to do for some time.

My purpose of this posting is certainly not to have someone else do the work, but rather get suggestions and direction on the best way to make this work, from others that have done something simular.

I've got a good understanding of ODBC commands and how to set up the drivers, etc...

My solution has multiple tables, about 20 of them have actual information that I would want to pull/push from. I would estimate 1,500 individual fields from these 20 tables are going to be used for this operation. So in other words, there is a lot of information I want to push/pull at one time.

I want to use ODBC because of the universal nature of it. It'll be slow, but it'll work. I'll probably program a XML solution as well, but that'll come at a later time.

I wanted to create a design so the end user could type in the table and fieldname of the "other" database that would line up with the FM field. I want to then run a script that would check all of these user fields - if not empty, then push/pull the info, repeated for each field needed by the user.

I figured this would be the most universal way of doing this, and would eliminate custom programming on my or their end. Neither end has to give out potential proprietary information.

Most clients don't use all of the features that this solution has to offer, so I figured that I would let them customize this as much as possible - if they dont' want/use a particular field, then they don't have to. I realize that this will take a LOT of up front time, but will be better in the long run.

Now, my real question is this - has anyone done this type of setup before? Any suggestions, comments, etc....