Query not selecting what I need it to

[MartDungay]

Hello,

I'm trying to run a simple query and I don't know why it's not working. I have a US cities shapefile with an "Population" field and I'm just running this: Select * FROM cities WHERE: POPULATION > '400000'

But it doesn't select populations that are above 400,000. It seems to just select whatever it wants - including cities with a population of 96, 3000, or 500,000. I don't know how it's deciding to select what it does but it selects about half of them with no logic to it.

Any ideas?

[MartDungay]

Here is another example. I want to select elevations above 996. So i Write ELEVATION > '996'

And it only sort of does what I want. In the picture below, you can see it selected 26 lines... but it did not select a line with elevation of 9650 which is clearly above 996.