Testing For Field Type/Status

Hello,

We are trying to test for a field in our 'setup' table and no matter what we do it's has a personality of its own. It's the wackiest thing. The field has two steps in this update script - first we are checking to make sure the field 'set_fsm' is still in the table, if so then we are blanking out the field by updating the value to a pair of ' '. Next, after the field now has just a blank value we are going to change the data type from char(10) to a bit field. However, when we try to check the code the first time it works but every other time the update script runs it doesn't work. The code below are two approaches that we have tried with our general update tools that is run on each version / product release we have. Assistance is greatly appreciated.

The record doesn€™t exit yet it still falls into the BEGIN.

IF exists (select * from dbo.syscolumns where name = 'set_fsm'
and id = (select id from dbo.sysobjects where name = 'setup'))
BEGIN
PRINT €˜I am here€™
UPDATE setup SET set_fsm = ''
END

It won€™t print the €œI am here€? but still tries to update the table!!!

Here€™s the results:
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Invalid column name 'set_fsm'.


Someone else said try this€¦

IF EXISTS (SELECT 1
FROM sysobjects o
JOIN syscolumns c on o.id = c.id
WHERE o.name = 'setup'
and c.name = 'set_fsm'
and o.xtype = 'U') -- because index columns are also stored in the sysobjects table
begin
print 'Found column'
update setup set set_fsm = ''
END
else
begin
print 'set_fsm column not found in table setup'
end

Same results:
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Invalid column name 'set_fsm'.