Hi, thank you Jamie,
I guess I really zoned out on that one, and forgot some additional details
Both DB are MS 2008, but...
They're in two separate instances on two servers (same network).
I've created a Linked Server to the AccPac server from my Production server, and queries work very tidy (currently using Cast as Int), this is gonna be a report that I will certainly want to tidy up in Crystal.
So now I'm wondering what kind of glitchery I'm I might possibly run into using an ODBC connector... Your suggestion certainly looks adaptable. I like the uniqueness of the link field, where the field is only used for linking, and all the original data keeps its native data type.
Any thoughts are welcome!
Matt