History of FirebirdInstallNotes

Things to watch out for when installing using a Firebird database.

All outstanding bugs have been cleared (:biggrin:)

The database name should be a full path and file name for the database in an existing accessible directory, or alternatively you can create an aliase in aliases.conf and use that as the database name during installation.

If the database can not be created, then the installer will display errors, but allow you to try again with a corrected database aliase or location.

Firebird is a simple yet powerful, fully open source relational database. It can be download from the Firebird Project Site

Reworked 17th Feb 2009 for Release 2.5 ( Still applicable for the 2.7 build )

1. While bitweaver will run with PHP4 and Firebird 1.5, it is prefered to use PHP5.2.x and Firebird 2.1.x. The Firebird PHP driver was much updated for PHP5 and those improvements were never back ported. And Firebird 2.1 has a few built in functions that can be emulated via the UDF libraries in earlier versions if required.
2. Installer should be able to create an empty database in which to build the database schema, but with the different Linux installs this sometimes fails. So it is easier to create an empty database and add it's alias to the alias.conf file before actually running the installer. bitweaver will then pick up this database to work with.
3. If you have Firebird installed and running correctly and Bitweaver fails to list it as an option during installation, you need to make sure your version of php is compiled with support for interbase. The relevant flag to add when compiling php is "--with-interbase".
4. While installing ensure that you do not add a custom table prefix as this will take table and other names over the 31 character limit that still exists in Firebird ( 22years of backwards compatibility is not easy to retain if this limit is removed )

Once a database has been located and the config_inc.php file has been populated, there should be no problems with using Firebird.