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...the difference is mainly in column order...

I was thinking of not considering these significant. Well, not in the initial version (I was thinking hashes rather than diffs ;-).

...but also the id and status columns are not qualified as "unsigned"...

I would consider those significant. Database engines might just change a flag in the format instead of updating each field: that's their business.

...you could always create a new table and load it from the old one, then rename the results...

That would be the database independent fallback. But since renaming a table is not standard SQL (is it, it would involve:

Liz

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