About InterBase 6 and Later, Dialect 1 Databases

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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 of ALTER 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 and DATE are not available to use as data types. DATE columns have the old meaning—both date and time. The new meaning of DATE – date only – is available only in dialect 3.
• All columns that were previously DATE data type are now TIMESTAMP data type. TIMESTAMP contains exactly the information that DATE did in previous versions.
• Exact numeric columns – those that have a DECIMAL or NUMERIC data type with precision greater than 9 – are still stored as DOUBLE PRECISION data types. All arithmetic algorithms that worked before on these columns still work as before. It is not possible to store data as INT64 in dialect 1.