I'm a developer and an 'Accidental DBA'. These forums have saved my a%$ more times than I can count. I am always struck by the accuracy and helpfulness seen here....

Of course, I forgot myself. Yes all access is via stored procs, so they don't even need to know about the tables.

Problem solved. Thanks all. Phil

Thanks, will do that in the stored procs and views... how to do that in tables?

Thanks. My experiment certainly isn't thorough. I think I'll try it on table defs and views and see what happens. I'm going to subscribe to the perspective that a dedicated...

There was a clue in your answer, Gail so I pursued it. So with respect, can I ask you to revisit your reply?

Here's what I did as an experiment:

Using SSMS,

I...

Thanks to all for the thoughts so far. It seems more complex than I thought. (I was just asking a how do I do this question..)

I wasn't clear that the...

I don't want to be a DBA. I'm a developer. But I find myself hosting and managing a few small databases for the applications I wrote for my clients. Ihave...

I'm coming up to 50 years since I wrote my first computer program. There's been a full technical career in there including the usual detours into sales and management. For...

Thanks, that's it. Simple, I just didn't know about it... Phil

Thanks to all. Yeah it's a licensing issue but I did all the development work, initially, on SQL Express on my dev machine so I know it's feature rich enough.

So...

Pointing to a different db is easy with asp.net (web.config).

How do I install another instance, is it just the same as installing a whole new SQL server? What risks are...

Thanks, that actually seems do-able.

There's no way to dynamically change the P1.dbo.Table syntax, is there? (without using the dreaded Dynamic SQL).

If I follow your suggestion, I have a syncronization...

Yes, that was an error I made during construction of the sample for posting. Sorry!

But it led to a useful learning exercise!

Phil

I was preparing some data to demonstrate the conversion error when I discovered the problem, which was not with the MAX statement, but with the CASE statement in the following:

MAX(CASE...

Yeah, thanks to Jeff as well.

Looks to me like the MAX function works only against numeric values because I had to omit the columns that contain some screwy character data...