Catalog changes that might affect existing applications

Any user-written stored procedures or applications that query system catalogs to obtain information must be changed to use the new datatypes for various columns. For instance, existing stored procedures and tools to regenerate table schema that look up information in syscolumns, will continue to work immediately following the upgrade. However, if new tables are created using the new limits, existing stored procedures are unable to retrieve the information from various catalogs.

For example, if a new table is created in with 300 columns, and an existing stored procedure declares a tinyint datatype to retrieve the column ID from syscolumns, this procedure cannot return the right information for this table because the table has more than 255 columns.

Similarly, other tools and procedures that access catalogs such as sysusers, syslogins, sysprotects, sysconstraints, and so on, must be updated to reflect the new column definitions. In general, all local variables in user applications and procedures need to be re-defined to match the datatype of the columns in system catalogs that are modified during the upgrade.

All Sybase stored procedures have been upgraded to reflect this change.