The biggest problem with that combination was always on the MS Access side, not ODBC. Many people who created Access front end applications that used ODBC data sources didn't know to use pass-through queries. If you don't use pass-through queries then Access had a tendancy to try to copy the entire table from the server to the application and then run the query locally. If you use Access with pass-through queries or with Access 2000 and later create an "Access Project", then you are using the back end database's query engine, not the local Access engine.