>Michelle,
>
>Yes, I use the AS to give them more meaningful names. The view designer can create that view but it's hard to maintain with the way it does it. So I just do it by hand. It's pretty simple because it's read-only just providing FK translations into "human readable" data.
>
>SQL can get real hairy, real fast but it's pretty amazing what it can do at times.

What's "FK"?

SQL is great. It's not easy to write, but it's much more elegant than scanning through tables.