Actually Sergey, you make a point. It is obviously a standard VFP Character field in the normal ODBC created cursor view. Does this make the difference that I'm missing here?

Funny thing is that I do not recall ever having previously encountered this kind of problem with any other similar customer's SQL data situation. I've trusted using VFP to do all kinds of updates over the years without any apparent problem which is why I'm now wondering if there is some VFP default or some SQL Server default setting that I've missed here or that needs to be changed in order to resolve this issue.

In addition, using either CAST() or PADR() with a column width parameter limit applied would work only in a situation where every data element in a column were to be exactly the same character length: Usually, that is not the case.

So I am really still somwhat mystified in looking for an all encomapssing solution. /psb