Invalid BLOB ID bug in Firebird 2.1.3

EDIT Sep 21st: Sinática Monitor 2.1.03 solves the issue. You may download it now. The original bug in Firebird 2.1.3 is already fixed in CVS too.

If you’ve followed my advice and upgraded to Firebird 2.1.3 only to find you’re now getting consistent “invalid BLOB ID” messages, please update Sinática Monitor to the latest version.

There is a very specific condition that triggers this error message and it’s highly likely you won’t be affected. If you are being affected, however, please check your environment:

  • In my testing the bug only occurs when there are clients attached using charset NONE. If you change them to use a proper charset such as ASCII, ISO8859_1 or UTF8 the error message will be gone. Any charset different from NONE will do. Also make sure Sinática Monitor is not using NONE charset.
  • If you run into this error and it’s not related to charset NONE, please . Every additional information will be helpful.

A new version of Sinática Monitor is available to fix the issue.

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Firebird 2.1.3 – Recommended update

Yesterday Firebird 2.1.3 was made public. As with all maintenance releases its focus is stability. A number of bugs are fixed and it is a recommended update for everyone using older versions of the 2.1 series.

Default authentication method changed

The Release Notes is quick to warn about a change that may break current setups: The default authentication method changed from mixed to native. In practice this means that before 2.1.3 you could use both firebird’s native authentication and windows authentication out of the box.

From now on you have to explicitly tell Firebird that you wish to use windows authentication. Simply change the firebird.conf configuration file to:

Authentication = mixed

Lighter nBackup

Prior to 2.1.3 nBackup could exhaust server I/O resources and negatively affect database operation. Starting from Firebird 2.1.3 nBackup is lighter and can be used even when the database is heavily loaded.

Monitoring Fixes

Some fixes are specially important for Sinática Monitor users and anyone that uses monitoring tables frequently.

  • Error “cannot transliterate” would happen when trying to read monitoring tables containing data from an attachment using character set NONE.
  • Possible “clumplet errors” while using monitoring tables in Classic Server Linux.
  • Data instability on monitoring tables while clients were connecting or disconnecting.

Other fixes

The list of bugs fixed is long and it’s easy to see that quality is the Firebird Team’s first objective. Kudos to everyone involved in this release and keep your fingers crossed for Firebird 2.5!

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