Hi Claudio,

although i can fully understand your attitude towards manipulating system
tables directly, i can only say that i use the full version of IBE since
its early days, mostly with IB5.6, and i have never had any problems with
it (imho when one wants to make such "deep impact" things as changing
the field type of a PK the order should always be 1. BACKUP 2. try and
3. see what happens, and if it doesn't work 4. Restore and write a data
pump ;-)

Otoh there are operations (like re-ordering the fields inside a table) that
afaikt can only be done by directly writing the RDB$'s and for that far
i'm just glad to have a tool that lets me do that.

Anyway, i was really glad to here that the makers of IBE took the decision
to release a free version (with the obvious good intention to give Firebird
users an alternative to IBConsole). And with all due respect, i don't think
it is very constructive for the whole community when the only reaction to
this is to focus on one single function that is not implemented the way
it is supposed to.

bottom line: instead of picking on bugs (that, as discussed extensively in
the last days, every software has... but they are usually fixed very fast
in IBE) i think it is appropriate to say a big THANK YOU to the authors
of IBE for their decision.

oh well, just my 0.02 eur...

regards,
fingerman