Visual Studio .NET - Why is data record retrieved from SQL table different when running localhost vs published?

I built a SQL statement to Select a record from a table ... the record retrieved when running on localHost is correct but when code is published, a different record is retrieved! Never encountered this before! 

Check your web.config or app.config files for differences.  Also, make sure it points to the same database instance.  Perhaps the data is different in one of the databases.

thank you for your reply ... the database is the same - what I think is happening is that the string variable for the "WHERE" clause is being cleared but I don't know why it would do that in published version vs localhost.