> Thanks for the isql pointer. Could you recommend a good open source
> tool to manage firebird schema changes? One of the reasons I like being
> able to get text out is version control; I can have my db schema checked
> into CVS along with the set of cgi scripts that interact with it. Is
> there some non-text dump way to get the same effect?

IBExpert will keep a metadata history (versioning) of your metadata for you
on each change if you want it to.

>
> Also, I was asking because I couldn't figure out how to get a particular
> alter to work. I have some tables with NUMERIC(10) fields. The perl
> DBI interface used by the script we have (developed when it was talking
> to Oracle) can't seem to handle those, I get complaints about 64bit
> stuff. So I want to change them to NUMERIC(9), which worked ok on a
> test table. However, if I do
>
> alter table foo alter column bar type numeric(9);
>
> in isql it complains that:
> -Cannot change datatype for BAR. Conversion from base type BIGINT to
> INTEGER is not supported.
>

IBExpert will also make this change for you by creating a script on the fly
to re-create a column.
You can do it manually too by creating a new column, updating it from the
old values, then re-creating a new column and putting the values back..

Alan