Hello all.

> Because 8 characters is easy to crack, you're advised not to use
> easily guessable words as passwords. Better to create completely
> random combinations of letters and digits.

(1) RE the 8-letter passwords... yikes. Sure, forcing alphanumeric variable-case random 8 letter passwords would get the most security out of 8 characters, but it still avoids the issue of brute force password attacks. I have no idea how difficult it may be to implement a brute force attack against interbase, locally or via internet, but I'd still like to have a larger password length reasonable for today's security expectations. To me, this seems to be about mid-level priority -- not urgent, but desirable asap. Is it going to be a problematic change?

(2) Via IBconsole sql, the udf Date Of Week processed as udf_dow('1/4/2002') returns Friday (4th Jan, today). Is the format of mm/dd/yy (not our usual format here in Oz) hard-coded into the day_of_week udf?

----- later addition -------

Okay, I just ran this test...

select full_name, hire_date, udf_dow(hire_date), cast(hire_date as varchar(12)) as timestamp) from employee

... and the varchar hire_date field reported as 'dd-mmm-yyyy' (e.g. '28-DEC-1988'), so I'm presuming that dates expressed anywhere as strings need to follow the dd-mmm-yyyy format?? i.e. in above, if I don't want to work in 'mm/dd/yyyy' for strings, the only alternative is to format as 'dd-mmm-yyyy' ? BTW, I have searched the docs for info on this, but no clues as yet.

Thanks,
Andrew Ferguson