The problem that many of us encountered with missing the first two
characters of a DB Memo field from SQL is corrected by the latest
Delphi update CD-Rom. However, read on:

In the latest CD_Rom, fields were missing in BDE when they were added
at the SQL level.

The problem appears to be a bug in either the SQL ODBC driver or it's
interface in DBE. (I'm using Sybase SQL Anywhere as a DBMs) Delphi BDE
or its ODBC cannot handle "long varchar" or "text" field types.
Regular "varchar" is OK.

When BDE encounters a "long varchar" type field, it stops
reading/looking for more fields and DOES NOT report the error. If you
try to access some other field which falls after the "long varchar"
field, it reports that the field does not exist.

This problem is not present in the original Delphi 2.0 CD-Rom.

For me, the work-around was to convert the "long varchar" fields to
simple "varchar".