OK, I'll preface this by saying I have virtually no experience with Access although I do know my around a MySQL database. We're moving our Member table online to a MySQL table within our site's database. I've setup an ODBC link to that table and on the surface, everything is working great.



I'm having a problem getting Access queries to read the data. Specifically, I query that uses an expire date field -- this query is used heavily in the site because it allows us to filter out inactive members. Even though the MySQL database has a Timestamp datatype (I've also tried Date and DateTime) Access views it as a text datatype. Presumably because of this, when I run the old query that filters for users whose expiration date is no more than 60 days after today's date, I get the full dataset as the result.

For what it's worth, the dates in the date expired field are formatted like a traditional MySQL timestamp: 2008-12-08 00:00:00.

I assume that I can modify the query to convert that string to a date then run the original query... but as I said, I'm an access noob. How do I do that? Am I barking down the wrong tree?

To the root cause of the problem, why is Access viewing all fields as text regardless of datatype in the source database?

Thanks