Hi Sven

> First, never start a new, unrelated question by hitting reply (you
> replied to Rick Roens question about changing field type). I chose to
> reply to Dmitrys answer (he started a new thread) to avoid messing up
> threading for those that use it.

Sorry, I don't understand how that could have happened. I see my original
message as
[firebird-support] problems testing FB2 rc4 SS on apache PHP webserver
and Dmitry's answer as
Re: [firebird-support] problems testing FB2 rc4 SS on apache PHP webserver
I can't see how using the admittedly lazy but also quicker 'reply to all'
method of opening a new topic is a problem as long as the subject line is
changed, which I did. Again, apologies if I am missing something obvious
here.

> Secondly, one thing Aage told me when I started working with him and
> InterBase (it was before Firebird was born), was that it was a bad idea
> to specify plans explicitly. Rather, I was told to hint the optimizer.
>
> I'd recommend you to modify your query like this (alternatively use +''
> rather than +0 if the field is a char or varchar field:

Firebird 2 handles this query fine without hints or supplied plans, but I
will try your suggestion in future, thanks

Gary