New DataDirect ODBC driver

Borland released new DataDirect ODBC driver for InterBase customers (thanks Craig for the info). Also separate ADO .Net driver for InterBase (BDP 2.5.0) available.
Both drivers are free for InterBase users, but there is another OLE DB driver that is very useful, especially for Visual Studio - IBProvider. It uses all existing and possible OLE DB features, like many transactions per one connect and others, and can provide nearly the same special InterBase functionality accessible in native components like FIBPlus and IBX.

Repair issue

Yesterday we got broken database from some popular (in tight range) commercial system. It is built on InterBase 4.1, and still being sold by developers for wide range of shops. But, sometimes in these shops server power failure happens. In this case damage was increased by old InterBase 4 bug when data in header page is being shiffled. Hopefully, information was not broken, just mixed.
Repair process was a bit tricky, and took about 3 hours. First, database needed to be repaired to work with Firebird 1.5. Second, it was repaired again. And then, it was moved back to InterBase 4 format.
Everything went fine, except 7 records in one table were completely lost. Anyway, it was a small data loss, so database now works fine.

Unbroken database

In May our support got a customer alert that his InterBase 7.5 database is broken right after restore. We found that really, even after only metadata restore gfix reports about broken indices on rdb$dependencies and other system tables. Borland responded very quickly, telling that this is gfix error - it does not understand correctly new index structure introduced in ODS 11.2 databases. Hopefuly, gfix does not "fix" these "errors", so database stays correct. This issue have number 240075 in internal Borland's bugtracking system, and will be fixed only in next InterBase version.
Stay tuned.