Thanks for that info. On your second point, I have read what I can find in Books Online, but I didn't find it very helpful.

What does SQL Server actually do...

Thanks to wz700. I now understand exactly how to do what I need.

I still think though, that there is a gaping hole in SQL that there isn't a simple SQL...

Thanks so much Scott. I'm sure this will do once I've plugged in all the variables.

I am surprised though, that what is so easy one way round - find the...

An additional difficulty that I should have mentioned is that I don't know the names of the columns - they are numbers assigned by the user, but they could be...

Yes, Chinese is one of the languages listed in my Control Panel regional settings.

I am just using EM.

Other users access the db through a website and they have no problem,...

Yes, that's the answer !

Thanks so much for your help.

Doug

As far as I can see all the FK constraints are there. I'm looking in sysobjects. Is that the right place to look?

Doug

Unfortunately, on a shared server, you cannot access the directory where the actual database is stored. Otherwise, you could make copies of everyone else's database.

Even so, I've now found that...

Thanks for reply.

I guess that means there's no easy way. What a pity SQL Server can't reverse engineer the database; look at the existing tables and automatically write the code...

Thanks to everyone for that. In fact my requirement is much simpler since no one can access the database directly and can only use the routines available to them in...

Thanks so much !!

I can extract exactly what I need from that.

Doug

From the info you gave me, I have got it working like this:

SELECT name

FROM sysobjects

WHERE name LIKE 'DF__Test__newcol%';

ALTER TABLE Test

DROP CONSTRAINT #CF puts the result of the previous select here#;

ALTER...

This is happening automatically on a website (through ColdFusion) and transparent to the user, so I need to identify this particular default on this particular column in this table.

Can I...