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>>No, this is exactly what I have. All my fields are always prefixed with the alias. And, I still have the behavior.
>
>That's unfortunate, I've never had that. I imagine that it is intermittant in that the SQL sometimes works and sometimes doesn't: it must be related to queries run before, perhaps, or if you have read the field into memory. I would guess that it doesn't happen the first time that you read it (otherwise you would not have been able to design the thing in the first place).
>
>What is the error message?

Michael,
Have you tried using the AS clause as a workaround - this does not answer your original question but select myfile.desc AS mydescript should help