Nice article, Mindy.

DirkFrazier, I think your solution is equivalent to Mindy's. The [value] field on the [sysproperties] table is a sql_variant type, so you could store just about anything in there I think, though I haven't tried it yet.

I bet there are some neat tricks you could use this for, like storing default formatting etc... the help file has some ideas for how applications could leverage this. I'm really just getting into XML but I see some potential to map some things that XML does to this property table that otherwise can't be directly stored as part of a database schema.

Yet another reminder to me that I should read up on the system tables regularly to find new tricks. 🙂

Matthew Galbraith