Just to let you know that what you suggested below works without any
problems and I can backup without any errors.

Again, thanks for your help.

Daniel Rail

At 20/03/2002 01:35 PM, you wrote:

>At 12:24 PM 3/20/2002 -0400, Daniel Rail wrote:
>
> >I do change a field from varchar(18) to varchar(6) in that table. And, in
> >one record, the field was bigger than 6 characters.
> >
> >Here's the process that is used in my code (the syntax might not be
> >accurate, but gives you an idea):
> >1. ALTER TABLE tbl ADD TEMP VARCHAR(6) CHARACTER SET UNICODE_FSS
> >2. UPDATE tbl SET TEMP=field_being_updated
> >3. ALTER TABLE tbl DROP field_being_updated
> >4. ALTER TABLE tbl ALTER TEMP TO field_being_updated
> >
> >The field being updated was created with UNICODE_FSS as well.
> >
> >Hope gives more indication on what could've happened. As you can see I
> >don't directly modify the system tables.
>
>Hmmm... strange. I would expect that you'd get the error on the
>update statement. My guess at the culprit is step 4 above, changing
>the name of the column. A safer, though longer, way to do that
>would be to replace step 4 with
>
> 4. alter table tbl add field_being_updated
> 5. update tbl set field_being_updated = temp
> 6. alter table tbl drop field temp