Opening Firebird database (8.15)

Question

I'm close to the end of my tether with this so any help would be gratefully received!

Trying to connect with Interbase "IBConsole" and I get the following message:

"Unsupported on-disk structure for file C:\TEMP\SYSTEM.GDB; found 8, support 15"

Searching for this problem suggests I need to run a GBAK on the old version and restore on new version. All "Restore" options in IBConsole are greyed out - so can't seem to do this. Running GBAK to restore on the newer server gives a surreal response:

"gbak: ERROR: Expected backup version 1, 2, or 3. Found 8"

I've installed "RazorSQL" - tried the JDBC driver with following error:

"GDS Exception. 335544379. unsupported on-disk structure for file c:\temp\system.gdb; found 8.15, support"

(same problem with both 2.1.1 JDBC driver and 2.2.4)

How can I open this database file or even convert it?

Answer 1

In this link you can see the correspondence between ODS numbers and Interbase/Firebird versions (it is in Russian but you can read the table). According to it ODS 8 corresponds to an Interbase version 4.0/4.1, a quite old one. ODS 15, on the other hand, would be an Interbase XE/XE3 database.

You should be able to retrieve more information on the database and its ODS by using gstat.

gstat -h c:\temp\system.fdb

Check this FAQ for more information on its use.

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To upgrade the ODS version you will need to following steps (make sure you do a backup copy before attempting them):

1. From the Interbase 4 environment perform a backup of the database.

   gbak -backup system c:/temp/backups/system.fbk
   

2. From your more modern environment restore the database.

   gfix -shut -tran 60 system
   gbak -replace c:/temp/backups/system.fbk system
   

The gfix shuts down the database and transactions startup for the database, and would only be necessary if the database already exists in the newer environment.

More information on backup and restore to upgrade ODS can be found here.

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Now, take in account you will need the gbak utility provided with Interbase 4 in order to be able to do the necessary backup of the database to upgrade it. It is not possible to do the backup with the newer gbak utility. I hope you have access to it.