Hi Luis,

> It's very nice to be able to make changes not normally allowed, but it
> screws your database in the process. Our policy is now..: ALL METADATA
> CHANGES DONE BY SCRIPT ONLY.

I suspected that your troubles were not caused by the InterBase itself, as
I haven't experienced similar behavior at my site. I use only isql and
scripts. I'm not that masochistic :-), but all the tools I tested failed.

I run the scripts using BATs under Windows and shell scripts
under Linux. Typically, the script looks like (the code below is Windows
BAT,
the Linux shell script looks similar):

@ECHO OFF
REM Friday database generation script
E:
REM Change this to whatever your InterBase / FireBird directory root is
CD Program Files\Borland\Interbase\Bin
REM Purge out the log
DEL f:\prj\Friday\src\Friday.log
REM Run scripts
ECHO Generating Metadata...
isql -i f:\prj\friday\src\friday.sql -o f:\prj\friday\src\friday.log -m
ECHO Ok
ECHO Initializing structures...
isql -i F:\prj\friday\src\initall.sql -o F:\prj\friday\src\friday.log -m
ECHO Ok
pause
REM Open the log
notepad f:\prj\friday\src\friday.log
REM End

The above batch run 2 scripts, one creates metadata (including
initialization procedures), and the second connects the existing
database and executes initialization procedures. The result is
in one log file.

I have never experienced a problem, even when the script
is a bit longer, full of referential constraints (several hundreds of kB
:-)).
The original scripts I extracted using IBConsole.

There are problems with this solution (the log messages are
a bit brief) and even if the script runs ok, you'll get

Use CONNECT or CREATE DATABASE to specify a database
Database: 'F:\Data\Friday.gdb', User: SYSDBA

messages in the log (or I'm missing something).

Regards,

Rado