>When deploying new database structures of applications that are already in use by our customers, we want to upgrade the dbc and the accompaning dbf structures, without erasing their live data.
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>We tried to by making an empty copy of our own developer's database, moving the customer's data in a backup dir, placing our empty (new) one in the data directory and with an "append from" statement to add the live data into the new structure (added fields will then be left blank; that's not a problem).
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>The problem is that during the data-import the stored procedures are triggered and cause multiple errors, ending in a complete mess....
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>We're eager to hear other people's experiences and possible third-party products that make it possible to 'weave' an old (data-carrying) database with a new (empty) one.

SDT (Stonefield Data Dictionary) has handled just about everything we could have asked it to, with the single exception of adding a surrogate primary key or candidate key field to a table (we had to write a block of code to add the column to the table and populate it before identifying it as a primary or candidate key to avoid the DBC complaining.) And since it had no way to know how to populate the field, we didn't expect it to.

Well worth the money at least IMHO.