Thanks! - that makes sense. I will definitely file it for future development/data migration that is on the horizon.

The other way around this (speaking to the original application programmer) was to return to the point where the original Access data gets loaded into SQL ( a weekly process) and change the MEMO fields to text there so that SQL never "knows" it was MEMO. It imports into table, and all the (dozens) of views work fine after that. Or, preprocess the MEMO, I suppose, would work too. That way there's no altering the underlying DB structure (which I attempted, but introduced other problems, so backed away from that solution.)