Bob,

>Well... if the productivity savings is there... a copy of SDT for each devloper is small percentage of the budget.

I don't want to get into the way funding occurs around here. Let's just say that spending over $200 in the first place for a tool like SDT (I can hear it now..."What are the hard savings derived from such a tool?") was almost a stretch.

>What you may want to do is hold off on creating the meta data in the early parts of the project. Once the design stabalizes and there aren't alot of changes appoint one person as a DBA. He will be the person that modifies the data and meta data from that point on. This is the person that will have a copy of SDT. Each developer can email or whatever project communications method you have (email, tracked, etc.) database changes to the DBA... He will make them and publish an updated data and meta data once a week perhaps.

Great theories, but in practice (and reality...we have been developing for over a year now) it doesn't quite work that way around here. We are all in charge of our own modules, but the modules also have a lot of interaction. Let's just say that I probably am the appointed DBA for the most part, but we still will have instances where the other developers can jump in and take some files over for a time (which is why we have omplemented VSS).

>If other developers need to modify the meta data and can't wait for the DBA, they will have to do it with browse.
>
>But, now, what about using the SDT functions. If you are using the functions to open tables and views to get the auto indexing and such, you still need a license for each developer.

Exactly, that's why even if we use the functions (to avoid the slow visual load times) we still have the developer-copy issue...that's what I was trying to say in my last post (probably wasn't very clear...it has been a very muddled day).

Thanks for the observations...

JoeK