There are times when you don't want a table to be viewable, I would think - like a table with salary information. There are plenty of good "outside in" viewers that can easily be activated from Windows Explorer and let one see the contents of all sorts of things.

Our approach to this depends upon the network to provide the necessary security (this is similar to the thread I just posted about the DBC approach). On our AS/400-driven network, each subdirectory can be assigned "rights" - including read, write, execute and manage.

There is a system-defined user group called "*PUBLIC" which, if assigned to a subdirectory, allows any system user to see the files in that directory as well as having read-only access. Specific users who need higher levels of authority are assigned individually by logon name. For critical directories, such as HR stuff, the *PUBLIC user is NOT assigned. Then, in an Explorer view, non-HR employees see only that there is a folder named HRSTUFF....but not even the file names are visible.

I don't know the methodologies, but I'm sure there are similar methods for Novell and Microsoft. Hope it helps!