If a single quote exists within the field specified by your WHERE statement, ODBC fails because of a parsing error. Although it seems intuitive, using \" around the field does not work (\"$var\"). The only solution I found was to replace all single quotes in my field with two single quotes. ODBC interprets the first single quote as an escape character and interprets the second single quote as a literal. Thanks to http://www.devguru.com/features/knowledge_base/A100206.html for this tip.