Thanks, John.

I still don't know whether it is truly important to narrow the selection of
fields. If it is (as I would think), and since field names tend to be
somewhat lengthy despite our best efforts, then it seems odd being limited by
the length of the string for a query. One would think by now there would be
some sort of behind-the-scenes mechanism to circumvent this limitation.

Thanks Again,
Pew

"John W. Vinson" wrote:

On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:13:01 -0800, oldblindpew
wrote:

Would this argue for using shorter field names?

That, or alias the tablenames and fieldnames: rather than

SELECT [LongTableNameA].[ThisIsABigFieldName],
[LongTableNameB].[AnotherBigFieldName]
FROM [LongTableNameA] INNER JOIN [LongTableNameB]
ORDER BY [LongTableNameA].[ThisIsABigFieldName]

you can use

SELECT [A].[ThisIsABigFieldName] AS BigA, [b].[AnotherBigFieldName] AS BigB
FROM [LongTableNameA] AS A INNER JOIN [LongTableNameB] AS B
ORDER BY BigA;

In a large many-field query with long fieldnames this can save you a whole lot
of characters.

Also, if a fieldname is unambiguous you don't need to qualify it with the
tablename; i.e. instead of

WHERE [LongTableNameA].[SomeUniqueField] = criteria

just use

WHERE [SomeUniqueField] = ...
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]
.