Coincidental to your posting yesterday I had the exact same situation that you mentioned with regard to Betrieve. The inexplicable returning of zero records. It wasn’t with a Betrieve back end but with another application. This time the backend was something called ProvideX. I’m using the ProvideX ODBC driver. I’ve had problems with it because it doesn’t support the UNION join which is annoying but today’s behavior is undocumented as far as I know. It took me a while to figure out what the issue was. So the statement:

SELECT TA.Field, TB.Field, TC.Field
FROM TA, TB, TC
WHERE (TA.F1=TB.F1) and (TA.F2 = TC.F2)

Returns a nice set of records. But adding a group on a field from TC causes an order by clause to drop in there and then we get the following:

SELECT TA.Field, TB.Field, TC.Field
FROM TA, TB, TC
WHERE (TA.F1=TB.F1) and (TA.F2 = TC.F2)
ORDER BY TC.Field

This returns a fat zero records. As soon as I saw this I knew exactly how to fix it because I had just read your posting. Using a formula instead of the field. I just put the field in the formula (I didn’t need to use Totext) so that Crystal Reports doesn’t pass the ORDER BY Clause into the SQL which is causing the issue. I then grouped on that and I was fine. Problem solved.