Re: [Firebird-devel] ERROR:Malformed string

[Dmitry Y. <fir...@ya...>]

Nikolay Samofatov wrote:
>   
> Dmitry, I believe this topic merits RM attention. Something needs to be 
> done to remedy the situation both for Firebird 2.1 (corruption by 
> default) and Firebird 2.5 (error by default).

I don't think that *any* default processing can be good enough. The 
engine doesn't know for sure what charset was used to store data or 
metadata. We can look at the database charset and even suppose that 
attachment charsets were the same, but anyway it's just a guess with 
accuracy less than 100%. I strongly believe that guessing is not what 
the engine should do.

The metadata upgrade scripts in v2.1 are documented, the same is true 
for the new restore switches in v2.5. We already had quite a few support 
questions about the <subject> error and asked them to pay more attention 
to the release notes. Nobody was blaming the server for being broken.

That said, I believe it would be more user friendly to catch this error 
in GBAK during restore and write out a more detailed message, e.g.: 
"unsupported sequence of characters. please retry with a -fix_fss_* switch".


Dmitry