Re: [Firebird-devel] ERROR:Malformed string

[Nikolay S. <nik...@re...>]

Dmitry,

Dmitry Yemanov wrote:
> 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 fact that gbak allows restoring old backups without 
-fix_fss_metadata switch *already is* the guess that metadata was stored 
in UTF8.
This guess is wrong in the majority of cases.
> 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.
>   
I understand the release notes thing, but Firebird (unlike other 
databases) is supposed to work by default and be user-friendly.
And FB 2.1/2.5 migration the process goes contrary to this logic.

For every compaint like this you have a bunch of silent users who simply 
ditch the migration attempt.

> 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".
>   
Agreed.

-- 
Nikolay Samofatov, MBA
Red Soft Corporation
+7 495 668 3735