In this case, that's true but SPs haven't always been that way.  Take 2005, for example.  In order to update RTM to SP2, you first had to update RTM to...

Thanks and, yeah, joined at the hip with you on vertically spitting such wide tables into sister tables but, like you say, not my idea on these tables and common...

First of all, I've only ever seen one other table consisting of mostly NVARCHAR(MAX) columns and it was horribly slow because of it.  I know you're just trying to get...