Helen Borrie wrote:

> At 12:37 AM 25/04/2006, Dany wrote:
>
>> The solution should be the one that caters for best practices in the
>> future. A funny workaround to allow legacy applications right away will
>> probably backfire later when writing more advanced applications.
>>
>> I know that I have been using the ability of IBO and the FB 1.5.x API to
>> return field names and relation names. A query contains a view or a SP
>> and I can ask what the fields real source was after prepare. Will such
>> functionality be broken? I have also some logic in my application that
>> creates alias names on the fly. On some occasions I have used the table
>> name as alias :(
>>
>> Going to FB 2 will be very complicated for me either solution that Jason
>> chooses. But it would probably coax me into better code-writing with a
>> cleaner solution.
>>
>> I really think that the FB team should have allowed for a "dialect"-like
>> possibility to use the old aliasing style.
>
> They did: it's called Firebird 1.5.3.
>
> Seriously, Dany, the added strictness of the distribution rules is
> not something one could choose to use or not. It is necessary
> because of the major clean-up and refactoring of the optimiser and of
> indexing. Everyone wants more speed from queries, everyone wants
> predictable distributions, etc. etc.
>
> Firebird 2 has been on the map for a long time. It's not as though
> the notion that getting more speed and featurosity from distributed
> queries would involve a lot of architectural change in the engine was
> unheralded. The distribution rules already got tighter in Fb 1.5 and
> broke a lot of folks' prior utilisation of "holes" in the InterBase
> implementation.
>
> We've had three years to clean up our act. Third-party drivers are
> bound to be affected by changes and it's a "given" that, to some
> degree, there's an inevitable lag between release of the new version
> of the DB engine and the driver catch-up. Driver developers no
> longer have that old "luxury" of guessing that not much changes in
> the engine from version to version. The InterBase era is over.
>

Point taken.

/Dany