Basically the architecture of what I'm trying to fit this into -- pretty much everything happens in SQL inside stored procs, so at this point I'm not really allowed any...

I've looked at that and SET PARSEONLY ON; both seem to work fine interactively but I can't get them to work inside a function.

I've found that the use of Access functions will dramatically decrease performance of upsized apps.  If you use things like IIF (a favorite, apparently) in your queries, all the data...

Unfortunately, you get an error trying the "Use" statement inside a stored procedure, so it looks to me like the only way to do it is via dynamic SQL (bleah).

The one reason I'm forcing myself to learn C# is that documentation can be included in the source code, and VB doesn't support this.  Still, case-sensitivity and forced ending characters...