Importing MySQL views *back* into MS Access.

[Bob Field]

I am in the process of migrating a MS Access database into MySQL. I have migrated all of the tables and I am working on migrating the Access 'queries' into MySQL views. In this interim compatibility mode, I have linked the MySQL tables and what views I have created so far back into Access as a temporary move until the migration is complete.

I have run into several problems so far:

1) Some Access 'queries' do not perform correctly on linked MySQL tables because they perform numeric date calculations using assumptions regarding how native Access data is stored and handled.

so I migrated a couple of these queries into views and immediately ran into:

2) Some MySQL views have columns that simply never show up on the Access side after the view has been linked into Access as an external table. Closer inspection showed that the colulmns I had generated for the MySQL views using the date_format function were in fact being exported as a data type of varbinary(x) and Access apparently feels free to quietly ignore these columns.

In an ideal world the solution is simply to finish the migration process, but in the meantime is there any way to change how a column is thus exported? varbinary is apparently similar to varchar, is there any way to force the varbinary columns to be exported as varchar?

Thanks,

Bob.