> -----Original Message-----
> From: IB-Conversions@yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:IB-Conversions@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of p51b.mustang
> Sent: Lunes, 11 de Abril de 2011 20:31
> To: IB-Conversions@yahoogroups.com
>
> Hi,
> I am in the process of converting a very old database,
> VI-T0.9.4.41 (if memory serves me best was the first release
> of Firebird from Interbase), to the latest release of Firebird.

Typically one does not jump too many versions ahead. Weren't you aware of
previous versions in that many years?

> Avoiding IBpump etc. because of the large amount of data, I
> initially performed a backup using the old version and then a
> restore under the new version. This appeared to work but
> large portions of data was missing.

And gbak didn't produce any error message?

> But, when I simply access the old database via the new
> version of Firebird and performed a backup and restore it
> appears to have worked. I verified the record count of the
> tables from the old to the new but I could not verify the
> data because the volume of information, especially in the
> blob fields, would be insurmountable.

If you didn't get any error with the other methods, I wonder if you are
ignoring some warnings you may have gotten with this second method. Ideally,
it should not fail, but many changes have happened between v0.94 and v2.5
and gbak may or may not fix everything.

> I am just wondering if my migration exercise was that simple,
> or am I disillusioning myself and will discover serious
> problems once the database and application are released into
> a production environment.
> Any comments would be appreciated.

Metadata may not be as clean as wanted.
Worse, metadata may not be 100% reliable. I mean, some adjustments in the
way some automatic triggers are defined may produce surprises (automatic
triggers are those that implement views' check option, cascade referential
integrity and check constraints). The new versions are also more strict in
the validations they perform and the DSQL they accept.

Try to extract metadata and see if it makes sense.

C.