I dont know that I'd agree with that effort entirely. Definitely if you can upgrade to SQL 2005 the use of the new max types makes things a little more flexible, but as a generalization they still store the majority of their data outside of the row - which is good for us as a performance tweak, as it keeps the core row size small for times when we do scans. The other part is even in SQL 2000 you can access text fields as long as you use an inserted trigger. A little more work, but at least its a way to do it.