Hello,

I have more than 250 firebird databases which my users use with my erp software. When I was develop that database it was on Firebird 1.5 and I use UNICODE_FSS collation driver for my VARCHAR fields. After that I was migrate (update) this databases to 2.0 than 2.1 and now I was updated this databases to 2.5 but UTF8 collation.
So here is a main problem. When I was designed table Articles it has for example field Name, ExtraName, ... which is VARCHAR(50). My Firebird database allow my users to insert 150 char long word into field which is 50 char long. Now, I decide to made brand new database with fields VARCHAR(150) instead of VARCHAR(50) in earlier version of database, and i must to migrate to UTF8 because UNICODE_FSS was very bad solution, and just to keep all data because users doesn't know that some values longer than 50 chars. And it is now extremly slow when I compare speed now and before and now I need some trick to decrease field size but to not copy data from one to another database, because I took a lot of time to my users which has very large database and now all works slow and I have a little problem...

Thanks in advance for any help...