Subject Problems with an old app, supporting only Firebird 1.5.6
Author Stanislaw Kaminski
Post date 2015-01-17T19:32:30Z
Greetings,
I am helping out a friend who's running a small business (language school). He is using LangSystem software for managing school's daily activities, which - despite being supported overall - uses very outdated FB version, 1.5.6. As you may imagine, my request to upgrade the app to support actively developed FB version were met with general 'meh' from the developer of said app :/

The problem we have is that due to general office setup, I need to move the database to an always-on server (the app usually runs a copy of FB locally on Windows, also providing net socket for additional clients).

We have such a server - small ARM thingie running Debian Squeeze. Of course, there are currently no packages for FB1.5 for Debian (and I was looking for it for quite a while), especially not for ARM Debian. I tried compiling from source, but failed miserably (though I would welcome if someone would be able to assist me a bit with that, I can provide more details).

Then I tried another venue - exporting DB from 1.5.6, and importing into 2.5 (because Debian/ARM _has_ 2.1 and 2.5). The export/import went pretty well, but on certain operations the app fails - I get "Dynamic SQL Error / SQL error code = -204 / Ambiguous field name between table GRUPY and table STUDENT_GRUPA / ID_GRUPY". I assume it's because the app does some SQL violation that worked in 1.5, but does not work above 2 (I tested with 2.1 as well, for good measure).

I also tried enabling backwards-compatibility options in FB config, but that didn't change a thing.

As last step, I tried enabling tracing to at least see those bad SQL queries so I can maybe ask the app developer to fix them - but on enabling trace I get "Trace plugin libfbtrace.so returned error on call trace_create, did not create plugin and provided no additional details on reasons of failure".

As such, I seek answer to one of the following:
- help compiling 1.5.6 for Debian ARM
- using some workaround that would allow FB >2 work with this crappy app
- help enabling tracing

You are my last hope.

Cheers,
Stan