Thomas Clarke wrote:

> It is broken down into two major parts, i)
> update the exe file based on version numbers and ii) update the Firebird
> database structure.

You could also version your database and make the upgrade simple.
Database changes are often not just about metadata, but also data
transformations and there is no way to do that in ad-hoc manner.
Consider for example changing from timestamp column to store the same
data into varchar(50) column with added timezone string. This requires
something like:

UPDATE mytable SET newcolumn = oldcolumn || ' default timezone';

Only way to apply such change to production database is to log it as
such. No database structure comparison tool would be able to handle this.

> Any ideas as to the best way to go about this?

Log all your database changes and apply them in production. Some tools
like IBExpert and FlameRobin have options to do this automatically for you.

See this paper for example implementation (demo source code included):

http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fbexport/managing_metadata_fixed.zip

--
Milan Babuskov

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==================================