About InterBase 6 and Later, Dialect 1 Databases
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Go Up to Migrating Servers and Databases
When you back up a version 5 database and restore it in InterBase 6, what do you have?
- A version 5 client can access everything in the database with no further changes.
- If there are object names – column or table names, for instance – that include any of the 17 new keywords, you must change these names in order to access these objects with a version 6 dialect 1 client. The new
ALTER COLUMN
clause ofALTER TABLE
makes it easy to implement column name changes.
- Version 5 clients can still access the columns.
- Dialect 3 clients can access these columns as long as they delimit them with double quotes.
- The 17 new keywords are reserved words. However, the new data types
TIME
andDATE
are not available to use as data types.DATE
columns have the old meaning—both date and time. The new meaning ofDATE
– date only – is available only in dialect 3. - All columns that were previously
DATE
data type are nowTIMESTAMP
data type.TIMESTAMP
contains exactly the information thatDATE
did in previous versions. - Exact numeric columns – those that have a
DECIMAL
orNUMERIC
data type with precision greater than 9 – are still stored asDOUBLE PRECISION
data types. All arithmetic algorithms that worked before on these columns still work as before. It is not possible to store data asINT64
in dialect 1.