>>Do you have to share "X"? How about add an "Z" state so that the sequences are: (N -> Z -> Y) then (Y -> X -> N)?
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>That would be a short term fix but since we are in the process of moving our app to SQL I also think it would be good to know how to tell if I modified the data.

In T-SQL you would check @@ROWCOUNT system variable which holds # of records affect by the last T-SQL statement. It's similar to VFP _TALLY but is reset by any T-SQL statement.