At 05:57 PM 1/09/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>We have been using IBO and Firebird for several years in a product
>that we release to our customers each Fall. Some customers have
>multiple releases (each from a different year) of our product running
>on the same computer. Some of the older releases use IBO 4.2lb and
>the newer versions use IBO 4.3Aa. All releases use Firebird version
>1.0.3 and everything works great.
>
>For this year we considering upgrading to IBO 4.5B and Firebird 1.5.3.
> The basic problem is we don't want to break the older releases by
>upgrading the Firebird server. I understand that the releases with
>IBO 4.2lb will require the OldParameterOrdering setting to be set to 1
>to work properly.

Correct.

>Will the newer releases, using IBO 4.3Aa and 4.5B,
>have any difficulties with OldParameterOrdering set to 1?

Yes.

>Secondly, I understand that if we change to Firebird 1.5.3 that all
>clients should use the 1.5 fbclient.dll (which we will rename to
>gds32.dll). But some clients will undoubtingly miss this step and try
>to connect using the old 1.0 gds32.dll. Will they get some kind of
>connection error? Will any data corruption happen if they can connect?

Not predictable. However, moving from 1.0 to 1.5 is a major step. This
question is similar to asking whether problems would occur if clients were
using the IB 5 client with Firebird 1. As developers of client
applications, we have a duty to do our best to ensure that our customers
use all the right stuff. See also my note below regarding the client library.

>My understanding is Firebird 1.5.3 can work with database files
>originally created with Firebird 1.0. If this is so, we will not have
>to convert the existing databases by backing up under 1.0 and
>restoring under 1.5.3. Is this correct?

They can work; but the databases will not have the changes in the system
tables until they are backed up and restored. The first backup and restore
on 1.5 will achieve that.

>Any other advice for our situation?

As a general thing, handle the upgrade as a big step. IBO has changed a
lot in 3 years; so has Firebird. Take great care to study the v.1.5
release notes and all of the 1.5.x sub-release notes, to identify issues
that might affect your application code. For example, 1.5 is a lot stricter
about protecting databases from ambiguities in joins. Some join queries
that worked in v.1.0 will throw exceptions in 1.5.

Don't use the 1.5.3 release candidate for production. When the release
does come out, some time this month, make sure you use the full release, of
both server and client. There will be a second release candidate before
the release.

The second release candidate (and the Fb 1.5.3 release) will have a
security change in the client library, which will affect existing IBO
applications that use the Add/Modify/Delete users procedures in IBO. This
client is *not* in the RC1 kit. Later today, I will put up a notice on the
IBO website about it, along with a download that can be used now with the
1.5.3 RC as well as with previous Firebird versions.

Helen