Hi there, while working with the data --odbc command in a loop I tried to get the information whether reading out the whole data for a step is useful by evaluating a very general sql statement. If there aren't any values at all the complete query should be skipped later in the script. However, the catch command does not set $error equal to 1 if the warning is printed that there were no values to read. I was using the ZIP variant for Windows XP. Have a nice weekend Leon