>How are you retreiving the back-end data? With a updatable Remote View? I have had trouble with RVs on the backend. They do not seem to pass .NULL. and they pad character fields with trailing blanks. Therefore a varchar field becomes the maximum field width even with only one character.
>Try using SQL passthrough, that works the way its supposed to. I have gotten away from using RVs with updates.

I use remote views all the time with SQL Server and they always seem to work extremely well. They are very fast and always update as they should. I also have not seen varchars being larger than they should because of padded spaces. What back end do you use?

I am a strong proponent of Remote views and SQL Server because my experience has been really positive.

The only problem I ever had was updating a Text in Database B using a SQL Server view defined in Database A.