• Ok, couple more questions then.

    You have a field called Year but are using a float datatype. I would suggest you use DATETIME types for any fields relating to well dates... Once in that format there is many ways to break it down and get what you need when querying the table. i.e. DATEPART(yyyy, mydatefield) AS year

    Also do you need to use float in col1 to col 40? I'm not saying there is never a need for that datatype but it can be a little tricky. I'm assuming you need decimal places so DECIMAL or NUMERIC might be better to use in your situation. However you obviously know your requirements but here is a little reading on the matter.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187912%28v=sql.105%29.aspx

    Also even if you create a "generic" table like you proposed make sure it's still contain relevant data to AN object. Don't try to jam every little field a user wants added to one table. As an example one of the said application I used to support allowed users to create forms and define there own fields right in the application. Fields would be added while some would be removed (but not delete from the database for reporting purposes). So to make that happen the database needed to be flexible. However not all custom fields were added to the same table. The database itself contained 3-4 of these types of tables with appropriately grouped data.


    SELECT quote FROM brain WHERE original = 1
    0 rows returned