Library

List of known incompatibilities between Firebird 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

  • fb_lock_print now requires a database path name in order to print the lock table. Use a "-d " command line switch to specify a database to analyze.

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.