>Sure, you could use that approach, but I would have thought that with "overriding all rules just for the import" and then "a procedure that ran only once and did more complicated changes such as filling a new field with a default, etc" plus "Things such as rights would not be moved over, but I can deal with those separately", it would be more "error prone" than keeping track of your changes as you make thme to the development box and having them applied automatically from any app instance that starts up.

Because our database is at an early stage and changes continuously I want to automate as much of the maintenance as possible. I must confess, however, that the main reason we use this approach is that I don't trust myself to keep track of all changes properly. This way we make all changes on a single database and write programs to create an empty database and to propagate the changes fairly automatically.

Thanks for your response and especially for bringing SQL-DMO to my attention.

Alex