What the heck does the datatype of y.a have to do with the table x? Who knows? Maybe EM is being clever—or maybe this is just another bug.
Any kind of script that applies settings to multiple objects, e.g. granting or revoking permissions to several tables, will be much quicker in QA than in EM. Pointing and clicking your way around EM’s GUI for repetitive tasks like this can be both cumbersome and prone to mistakes. Using a loop or writing out multiple GRANT statements in QA will be much easier; in addition, you can quasi-automate many of these tasks using undocumented system procedures like sp_MSforeachtable. Here is a script you can run in QA, which will generate a script in the bottom that applies SELECT access to all tables to the user ‘bob’… once you’ve generated the result, copy it from the bottom pane, paste it into the top, and voila. (This works best if QA is set to Results in Text.
