The alter table issue is annoying, but not fatal, since most folks will do site maintenance in single-user mode anyway (at least, I do!).
The ORDER BY and GROUP BY issues are more serious in regard to the ACS, as you can't do things like "ORDER BY upper(foo)" directly. You can do "SELECT foo, upper(foo) as up_foo ... ORDER BY up_foo", though, so it's not that big a deal perhaps????
BTW, in IB's defense their implementation of ORDER BY and GROUP BY is standard SQL92 - PG and Oracle have extended the construct beyond the standard (fine by me!).
