Andy,

If by server you mean a true RDBMS such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, etc.,
then the processing will be done at the server and the resultset will be
returned to the client.

Of course, if by server you mean an Access database file then the processing
will be done on the client, regardless of where the Access file is located.

Kerry Moorman

Much of that depends on the design of your provider and the database.
I believe with MS SQL server (all variants), the query is passed to the
machine where the SQL Server is actually installed.

I have also worked with older systems (such as a Thoroughbred DB that
uses flat files) where the ODBC client does all the work...which means
that the client machine itself  needs to have some processing power
behind it.

No, you are still being very vague on what a client is in your
understanding, and what a server is. That answer did not clear anything up,
really.

Well, presumably the client tells the server to run a query for it. So of
course the server is the one that handles this request.  The client in this
case just passes along the query it wants run, and that's it.  This is the
only client/server scenario I can imagine, or else you don't really need a
server.

But, in this case, I am not sure why you would ask this question. Since the
whole concept is that the client asks the server to run the query - and the
server goes to the database. So there is no possible way the client can be
handling running the query.

The server, however, is responsible for connecting to the DB, etc, but of
course it is the database server that runs the actual query. The database
server parses the query, creates the execution plans, and goes gets the
data.  The server component of an application is not itself a database
engine, it is just handling client requests.

Only the database server/engine ever truly executes queries. It returns the
result set to whoever requested it - in this case the server component of an
application, which in turn hands the data over to the client application.