On 4 Mar 2002 at 15:26, Helen Borrie wrote:

> At 10:40 PM 03-03-02 -0500, Paul Schmidt wrote:
>
> >The firebird team, decided, after asking users and developers, that
> >this situation should return an error, so that it can be caught
> >during the debug stage, rather then waiting until you find out six
> >months into production that a result has been wrong most of the time.
> > Borland has not yet fixed this error, in Interbase AFAIK.
> >
> >So, how does this relate, old Interbase SQL could have ambiguous
> >fields, that Firebird will catch, but Interbase will not. You need
> >to warn customers who have old Interbase installations, of this fact.
>
> Actually, it's a little-known fact (thanks to the incipient dementia
> of the author of the FB beta release notes) that Firebird will throw
> an error on ambiguous queries only on a Dialect 3 database. In
> Dialect 1 (incl. IB 5.6) it will throw a warning, but the DML will be
> allowed to proceed. This concept is known as "bug compatibility", a
> traditional feature of IB databases that we part from with the deepest
> sorrow.
>

Your making the assumption that an old IB installation is <= 5.6, where it could be a
6.0 release, that uses Dialect 3. It's still impossible to run them side by side, unless
we rename gds32.dll and change the port. Hey wait a minute, I guess Mr. Klink
could always download the FB sources, change the name of gds32.dll and change
the port, and roll his own binaries. Heck I plan on downloading the source, once I
can get $#%@! WinCVS to quit dying on me, taking the computer with it.

Paul
Paul Schmidt
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com