Hi Michael
>The tables are NOT normalised, key words are used for field names, etc so I would be very happy for this to all go away as a copyright issue
Whether it is a copyright issue or not, it sounds like the design is bad to begin with. I would go with new tables and create a migration routine to ensure that historical data is ported into the new structures.
This is much more efficient than trying to replicate bad code!
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Regards
Andy Kramek