At 02:03 AM 29/11/2011, Thomas Steinmaurer wrote: >Hello, > >Dmitry presented at the conference some things (AFAIK e.g. changing NULL >to NOT NULL and vice versa) in Firebird 3, which replaces the need for >directly updating the system tables, as this might be disallowed in FB 3 >anyway. He asked for additional use cases, which currently need direct >system table updates.
Here's another one: the COMMENT syntax for loading varchar text into RDB$DESCRIPTION. If loading this (BLOB) column is restricted to using the DML, making the system tables read-only will break utilities (like isql, FlameRobin and probably most of the others) that currently enable "updating" of RDB$DESCRIPTION via a blob editor. IMHO, the limitation of COMMENT to a string of (32765/3) characters (unicode_fss) with no facility to either format or update the content makes it fairly toothless as a means to maintain a data dictionary. I'm very much in favour of making the system tables read-only (of course!) so i wonder whether RDB$DESCRIPTION might be approached via a system-defined view on each RDB$-- table affected, perhaps with access restricted to owner and users with SYSDBA privileges. Helen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
