Hello.
This is my first post to a technical forum and, since I could be biting off much more than I can chew, it could be my last post. I'll rely on your advice about that.

I work for a retail organization that offers special prices through weekly ads. Our POS/inventory software uses Pervasive SQL. I would like to be able to generate a report that will result in information regarding the number of advertised items sold during a given advertising time period. We have 9 departments and one or more of them can be represented in each ad. The departments are designated by numbers such as 100, 200, 300 etc. through 900. Within each department (or category) there are subcategories eg 101, 105, 106, 201, 301 etc. Inventory items are (or can be) segregated into those sub categories. I don't know if I've given you enough information but...

My questions are:
Is there a way to extract the information I need through using SQL queries?
Given that I have no experience with queries, programming etc should I not even attempt to do this on my own.

Thank you for listening to someone entirely out of his element but curious and willing to give it a try.

Jim

Short answer is that it is possible in most cases. Whether you can do it or not depends on a few things. First, what version of PSQL are you using? All versions since PSQL 2000 (including v8, v9, v10, and v11) have ODBC drivers included. You would need DDF files describing your data files. You may already have them or you may need to go to the vendor of the application or you may have to build them yourself. It really depends. Once you have DDFs, you can use the Pervasive Control Center to see the data and issue queries for testing. As far as reports, you might look at Crystal Reports or other reporting tools. You could also build an application yourself to do execute the queries.

From a query perspective, as long as you stay away from INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE queries and stay with SELECT queries, the worst you will do is slow results. If you want to insulate yourself while learning, you can make a copy of the database and use that until you are ready to run against production data.