REPLICATION
47
4
Migration
If you back up a
NUMERIC
or
DECIMAL
column with a precision greater than 9 (for
example,
NUMERIC
(12,2)) in an InterBase 5 or earlier database and restore the database
as InterBase 6, the column is still stored as
DOUBLE PRECISION
. Because InterBase does
not allow datatype conversions that could potentially result in data loss, you cannot use
the
ALTER COLUMN
statement to change the column datatype from
DOUBLE PRECISION
to
INT64
. To migrate a
DOUBLE PRECISION
column to an
INT64
column,
you must create a new
INT64
column and copy the contents of the older column into it.
In InterBase 6 dialect 3, when you create a
NUMERIC
or
DECIMAL
column with a precision
greater than 9, data in it is automatically stored as an
INT64
exact numeric.
For more information, refer to the Migration chapter in Getting Started.
Replication
IBReplicator is a component of the InterBase 6 product that facilitates replication and
synchronization between multiple InterBase databases that have similar structure.
IBReplicator synchronizes databases by copying changes of the entire database or a
subset of the database, as you specify. Replicant databases can reside on different servers
or on the same server. This product component includes a replication server executable
for each respective InterBase server platform, and also a Windows graphical tool for
configuring and invoking data replication. You can find documentation for configuring
and using IBReplicator in the “Data Replication” chapter of the Operations Guide.
The version of IBReplicator for InterBase 6 contains the following new features:
g
A new command, Remove System Objects, removes all triggers and other system objects
from a source database without having to remove target databases from the schema.
g
All configuration databases now have an option to change/enter the Current Schema
Number. This is required in complex
replication environments; see IBReplManager.hlp
for details.
g
The Replication Server can automatically map all tables and fields on the source database
to tables and fields of the same name on the target database.
This release also fixes bugs related to the Create System Objects command, recovery
from lost/completed connections, replicated deletes with
NUMERIC
and
INT64
primary
keys.