At 01:00 PM 04-03-02 -0500, you wrote:

>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.

I'm trying to work out the logic that makes you assume that I am making
that assumption...<g>

Firebird can open an IB 6 database but it can *also* open a 5.x database,
which it sees as a Dialect 1 database. So it throws a warning on a Dialect
1 database - hence my "In Dialect 1 (incl. IB 5.6) it will throw a warning,
but the DML will be allowed to proceed."

H.

All for Open and Open for All
Firebird Open SQL Database · http://firebirdsql.org
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