Doug - thanks for the info. I suspected that the ADDs were taking place before the DROPs. That explains the error. Any chance of a 'DropBeforeAdd' switch? Is that feasible? Anyway, thanks for a great product. Highly recommended.

>Hi Chris.
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>>this is off topic but was hoping you could describe in general terms how the tableupdate routine in SDT works. By that i mean in the event where new fields are being added to an existing table AND existing fields are being removed from the same table, is the processing order to ADD the new, then REMOVE the "old" fields? I ask because i encountered a "too many columns" error during an update where a couple of new fields were being added while a large number of fields were being removed. The NET result would have altered a table so that the field count was below the max allowed. Using SDT5.1.
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>SDT uses a variety of mechanisms to update a table, depending on what changes were made, but the most common one creates an ALTER TABLE statement that's then macro expanded. DROP COLUMN commands are added to the statement after ADD COLUMN commands, although that may depend on the exact version of SDT you have (that's the way it is in the HowToSyncTables methods of 5.1k and later).
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>Doug