hmerril has hit the nail on the head - you have a problem with converting your string representation of a date to the database representation of a date. MS Sql Server should (probably) automagically convert a datestring into a date if you present it in the expected format, whatever that is. I don't know MS Sql Server, but Oracle expects it as 'DD/MON/YYYY' (e.g. 17/SEP/2003). I haven't used ODBC in years, but I expect that hmerril is also correct in guessing it doesn't support the specific-to-MS-Sql-Server "cast" function. ODBC is database independent, so I bet the corresponding Oracle function "to_date" isn't supported either.