question re SQL

[Jacqueline N Loop/LOO/CC01/INEEL/US]

Hopefully you'll bear with me on this question - I am the webmaster for our
library & know
next to nothing about databases.  I tried searching the archives & got
myself more confused.

We've set out on a project to combine 6 separate catalogs (books, reports,
etc) into one
large fully web-searchable catalog.   All told that would amount to just
over 100,000 records,
for now,  (we don't use full Marc records so none of our entries is
"long").

Our programmer started out in Access,  decided that wasn't going to handle
things & purchased
SQL 7, which is what we're using to present the data over the web.  For
some reason, it didn't
click with me til recently that we're using SQL for what it seems most of
the people on this
list feel Cold Fusion can do so well!  <sigh>

Things don't seem to be going well - fixing one problem always seems to
lead to another, search
results seem vaiable or are incomplete & our programmer discovered a bug in
the SQL keyword
indexing routine that Microsoft is working on.   Until this is fixed our
keyword searching is
limited to one field at a time.  Some of us are beginning to wonder if SQL
is
really robust enough for our project, although certainly I would not
consider our library collection to
be large.  I've asked our programmer about this, but after spending so much
time on the
project, he doesn't want to hear that question.

Does anyone have any comments/advice or similar experiences with SQL?

Thanks
Jackie Loop
loo at inel.gov