At 10:31 PM 8/05/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>This is all good and makes sense, but it basically means (despite all
>claims) that Firebird is not 100% compatible with Interbase 6 and
>earlier versions since ambiguous queries like the one above have
>always worked in IB.

Ah...no. It has never been claimed that Firebird would continue to support
IB bugs...Over more than two years, some long-standing consistency bugs
have been fixed, and the process continues. The ambiguity problem in
multi-table queries was fixed a long time ago and is documented in the
v.1.0.n release notes. You need to familiarize yourself with these.

>Also the fact that the error message is so
>obscure makes me think that this functionality was turned off by
>mistake rather than intentionally.

You don't say which version of both client and server were being used. You
haven't provided these details; but, if you are using the wrong client
library, you would receive this message for any exception which the client
does not know about.

Using Firebird 1 build 798 with the correct version of gds32.dll, the
following query (equivalent to yours) produces the correct error message:

select p.person_id, p.surname, m.status from
person p
join member m
on person_id = m.person_id

ISC ERROR CODE:335544569

ISC ERROR MESSAGE:
Dynamic SQL Error
SQL error code = -204
Ambiguous field name between table PERSON and table MEMBER
PERSON_ID

>In any case, my project has
>thousands of queries like the one above and this little thing will
>basically prevent me from migrating to Firebird. Too bad...

Yes, it is a pity if you are unable to correct your SQL and take advantage
of more than 3000 bug-fixes done over the 2+ years since that old IB 6 version.

cheers,
heLen