At 07:39 PM 3/11/2002 -0800, Tony Mays wrote:

>Are saying that Firebird does not suffer from the 255 instances issues with
>ALTERING tables. If so, does Firebird have an instance limit?

There is still an instance limit, and it is still 255. However,
many fewer changes cause the counter to increase. About the only
ones are adding fields, dropping fields, and changing the size
of fields.

The counter is actually the "format version" and is stored with
every record - a good reason to make it small. It should describe
the physical layout of records in the table - 33 bytes of varchar,
4 bytes of long, 8 bytes of blob id, etc. The code that updates
tables handles lots of changes that don't affect the format. I
changed it to check whether the format had actually changed, and
no increment the counter unless it had.


Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
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