Hi George,
1. Thanks, this sounds good to me!
2. Checking the file difference. It would be cool if we could just run a command that would output the version but this sounds good too.
OK I ran the cksum for the Shapelib and Raster and they are clearly different.
Shape Library
/emc02/gisapps/sdeexe102/lib gist > cksum libst_shapelib.so
3801246941 12473072 libst_shapelib.so
/emc02/gisapps/sdeexe102/lib gist > cksum libst_shapelib.so.bak
1534200779 12315010 libst_shapelib.so.bak
Raster Library
/emc02/gisapps/sdeexe102/lib gist > cksum libst_raster_ora.so
1151397453 13043210 libst_raster_ora.so
/emc02/gisapps/sdeexe102/lib gist > cksum libst_raster_ora.so.bak
1756219263 12891306 libst_raster_ora.so.bak
I made multiple copies of the original (bak2, bak3, etc.) and ran the cksum on those and the results were identical to the *.bak copies. This helps a lot because we were just looking at the file size before and the Raster libraries were the exact same size!
Thanks again for the insight and suggestion! This is my first time posting and I am experiencing how helpful the community is in only an hour. Very cool.