Linus
with some success we had a view developed over several spde tables which had similar but not identical shape.The system option msglevel=i indicated which of the different spde indexes were being used. This way of joining "similar" tables was what I had in mind.
For the original problem of occasionally having peripheral columns in addition to the "standard", I could imagine clustering the tables where structure differs and appending where structure is the same (although I'm not sure appending provides a great benefit when using spde)
peter
... View more