Thanks for the suggestions everyone :-)
I've settled on JDBC for the time being, since I'm much happier in java than C++, and I have a valid JDBC driver on this system that I can use to connect to a local db ... however, the application is designed to connect to a central mysql server, and so far I can't seem to find out how to do this ....
any ideas (please!) ... surfing the web, I get lots of help in connecting to a local sql server, but none seem to refer to connecting to a remote sql server :-(