Yes, I too have been tackling this problem since Allbase "D" Every release has some external that did not exist on the previous one. On one occasion HP added a parameter to sqlxcon (or similar) and this was on a PASS!. So, I had to have different versions as follows: Allbase E Allbase F pre Pass 33 Allbase F pass 33 and above Allbase G I've scrapped the E and pre 33 versions now, but still have the other two! Why oh why was sqlxcon (?) not made option extensible to begin with? The Allbase team has known about this problem for ages (I've reported it at least four times over as many years). From an ISV's point of view it makes life awkward to say the least. From an IMAGE/SQL User's point of view he simply cannot develop on one of his systems then expect to distribute code to all others unless they happen to be on the same release. If I remember correctly, the reason why HP will not fix this problem (or say it won't happen in the future) is that features on one version of image/sql are not compatible with previous versions. True, but surely developers are intelligent enough to program according to version. Thanks for highlighting this real problem in public Denys. On HP-UX, it's even worse.....because of the lack of shared libs for Allbase, you have to link in the parser with your program. The parser does its work according to the version of allbase you linked on. This means,for example, that if you linked with the F libsql and found yourself running on a G Environment and tried to emit a valid TRUNCATE TABLE command, the F libsql would reject it because it knows nothing about TRUNCATE (not available on F). So I have to supply two versions on UX also. Mike Whiteley