Synonyms and syscolumns

Folks, A co-worker is using an HP tool called IAsolid to access Online from a PC. This tool has an Excel style interface (or he's using it from Excel). IAsolid determines what columns are available in the database in question by checking syscolumns. For this particular application the co-worker built a private database which consists of views and synonyms to other databases - all read-only. The catch is that a synonym - while registered in systables, does not appear to get registered in syscolumns. I can see that the reason for this might be that a schema change on the 'real' copy of the table would outdate the syscolumns entry - is there any other reason? The co-worker went ahead and slipped some rows into syscolumns to define his tables for IAsolid. It appears to work. Is there a problem with this that anybody can think of? I can see that whenever we change the schema somewhere else - we will have to go back and fix syscolumns, but I can't imagine any other problems offhand. cheers j. _____________________________________________________________________________ Jack Parker - Contractor | Hewlett Packard, BSMC Boise, Idaho, USA| Nuclear War, jparker@hpbs2561.boi.hp.com | let's get it over with (208) 396-5388 (W) (208) 384-1623 (H) | _____________________________________________________________________________ Any opinions expressed herein are my own and not those of my employers. _____________________________________________________________________________