>I, too, was surprised to hear Rod's approach of updating all fields all the time, but who am I to say that it's wrong? I might consider it strange, but I'm sure he'd consider some of my "best practices" as strange, too.

You seem to be giving Rod a lot of latitude here. When I read what he said he did and how he did it in his DataClass framework, I was, frankly speaking, amazed. On the one hand, you cannot argue with his credentials but on the other hand, the thought of "doing it" like DataClass makes me shudder.