Hi,

did the layout of external files change from 1.5.x to 2.0?

I'm doing imports with external tables using the native datatypes. On
firebird 1.5 everything worked as expected (integers used 4 bytes,
bigints used 8 bytes). On firebird 2.0 it seems that integer fields
are filled with 8 byte instead of 4 byte if a integer field comes
after a bigint field.

Consider the following SQL:

SQL> create table b1 external file '/database/external/b1' (a bigint,
b integer, c bigint);
SQL> insert into b1 values (1,2,3);

Gives the following layout on a 1.5 engine:

e:~ chris$ hexdump -C /database/external/b1
00000000 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 30 00 00 00
|................|
00000010 00 00 00 00 |........|
00000014

and on a 2.0 engine:

e:~ chris$ hexdump -C /database/external/b1
00000000 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
|................|
00000010 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |........|
00000018

Did I miss something?

If I add another integer field in 2.0 after the integer field, 2.0
does not add another 8 bytes to table - it reueses the space from the
first added integer.

Thanks,

Chris