errr, here you might be wrong though. The client apps need to be addressed as well. For example when inserting a record, you need to change the call to the stored procedure to change the number of parameters. If you've got a few dozen installation of one database app, you don't wan't to be bothered with incompatible versions of SPs combined with an incompatible client app version.

The case is however that you don't want to maintain a huge number of inflexible SPs. If something is wrong, it is much harder to debug what is going wrong than within your client application.

Maybe, maybe not. If you have a 'thin' or 'smart client', you may need to make a change on the application server, which is just one change in one location. And even if the change 'does' ripple all the way down to the client level [e.g. a new entry field that maps to a new db column], the new click-once capabilities in VS2005 make the deployments pretty painless.

Bottom line, there 'are' capabilities in the tools to make these types of changes routine and pretty painless.

Kevin