hi,

I am working on a complex firebird database at work. When I try to alter the
schema e.g. adding a join to a certain view, I later get this error:

"Too many Contexts of Relation/Procedure/Views. Maximum allowed is 255"

Hacking around this limitation is making my life difficult, and making our
database even more complex than it already is!

We are using an older version of firebird, 2.0.3, so I am wondering if this
limit of 255 contexts has been increased or can be configured to be higher in a
newer version of firebird. If not, we may need to look at doing this in house
and contributing that back to the firebird project. Any guidance or assistance
with doing this would be very much appreciated.

Our database performs quite well, and I think it is implemented quite well.
It could be better, but it is basically just large and complex, with many
tables, views, joins, triggers, etc. It is modelling complex business
processes, and we don't really have the time to refactor or heavily simplify it
right now.

So we really would like to increase this limit of 255 contexts. I suppose it
might be as simple as changing an "unsigned char" field to a "short" or an
"int" in the firebird engine (at numerous places no doubt). It sounds like a
typedef might be in order.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this problem!

Sam Watkins


P.S. Please don't just tell me to do it differently, or that the fault is with
our design not with firebird. There are reasonable well-designed databases
that would use more than 255 firebird "contexts", and would perform well enough
with firebird on modern hardware were it not for this limit. I can see that
255 contexts was a reasonable limit for InterBase on DOS / old windows, but
it's not so reasonable these days on a modern Linux server.