MS, in their infinite wisdom, have changed the systems tables between SQL
Server 6.5 and 7. Trigger, procedure and view sources were kept in a table
with the column containing the source defined as VARCHAR(255). Long source
definitions were made by linking together multiple rows in this table
ordered by a 'position' column. I could read the data out of the system
table without any problems.

In SQL7, the column in question has been changed to a different type of
length 8000 and a new VARBINARY column (also length 8000) seems to have a
copy of the same source. The problem is that Delphi with BDE 5.10 returns a
datatype of ftBytes and a datasize of 255 for the column. I can't read more
than the 255 characters that the BDE is saying is the maximum for the
column. I have tried both D3 and D5 with the same result. Has anyone else
experienced this problem?

Alternatively, is there some way with a non-persistent TQuery to override
what the BDE has determined are the characteristics (specifically the
length) of a column in a table?

BTW, SQL Explorer cannot handle some of these new datatypes either. It
either issues an exception and refuses to show any data, or it just omits
the column(s) from the display window. For some strange reason it also
decides not to show any columns named 'name'. Does anyone know what is going
on here?

Regards,
Danny Mavromatis.