LIST OF KNOWN INCOMPATIBILITIES
between Firebird versions 2.x and 2.5
This document describes all the changes
that make v2.5 incompatible in any way as compared with the previous
releases and hence could affect your databases and applications.
Please read the below descriptions
carefully before upgrading your software to the new Firebird version.
INSTALLATION and
CONFIGURATION
The database migration
process might require some special steps. If the database restore
fails with the error "malformed string" for you, please
pay attention to the files in the /misc/upgrade/metadata directory
of your installation and use the new -fix_fss_data and
-fix_fss_metadata command line switches of GBAK.
Priorly deprecated parameters
OldParameterOrdering and CreateInternalWindow of firebird.conf
are not supported anymore and have been removed.
Parameters LockSemCount and
LockSignal of firebird.conf don't require tuning in the new lock
manager implementation, so they have been removed as well.
Now Firebird can be built to be
relocatable in POSIX environments. That means the installation
directory is based on Firebird executables and libraries, and
libraries are not hard-coded loaded from /opt/firebird/lib.
To enable this feature,
--enable-binreloc parameter should be passed to autogen.sh.
It is expected that this feature is turned on by default in v3.0.
If you used to copy utilities to different places and rely on
libraries being loaded from /opt/firebird, that will not work in
this mode. The correct approach would be the creation of symbolic
links.
SQL SYNTAX
A number of new reserved keywords
are introduced. The full list is available here:
/doc/sql.extentions/README.keywords. Please ensure your DSQL
statements and procedure/trigger sources don't contain those
keywords as identifiers. Otherwise, you'll need to either use them
quoted (in Dialect 3 only) or rename them.
SQL EXECUTION RESULTS
Malformed UNICODE_FSS strings and
blobs are no longer allowed.
Prior to Firebird 2.5 the SET
clause of the UPDATE statement assigned columns in the user-defined
order with the NEW column values being immediately accessible to the
subsequent assignments. This did not conform to the SQL standard.
Starting with Firebird 2.5, only OLD column values are accessible to
all the assignments of the SET clause. You can revert back to the
legacy behavior via the OldSetClauseSemantics parameter of
firebird.conf, if required. Please be aware that this parameter is
provided as a temporary solution for backward compatibility issues
and will be deprecated in future Firebird versions.
UTILITIES
API
Inappropriate TPB
(transaction parameter buffer) contents is now rejected by
isc_start_transaction() and isc_start_multiple() API routines. For
example, it's not allowed to specify "no wait" and
non-zero "wait timeout" options together, neither it's
possible to specify "no record version" mode along
with "snapshot"
transaction isolation mode, etc.
SECURITY
Members of administrative Windows
groups are not mapped to SYSDBA any more by
default. Mapping is controlled on per-database basis using SQL
command
ALTER ROLE RDB$ADMIN SET/DROP AUTO
ADMIN MAPPING.
See README.trusted_authentication for
details.
| 
