BLOB fields not loaded with RequestLive = true on Delphi 7 + Firebird 3.0+ via ODBC

[Automafour]

Hello everyone,

We are facing an issue while updating our legacy Delphi 7 system to work with Firebird 3.0+ using BDE + ODBC.

In our data-entry screens, we use the TQuery component with RequestLive = true, without using UpdateObject. In this scenario, when we open the table to view existing records, BLOB fields are not being loaded.

If we set RequestLive = false, the BLOB fields are loaded correctly. However, disabling RequestLive is not an option for our current workflow, since we rely on live datasets for editing purposes.

From our research, it seems that this behavior is related to changes introduced in the Firebird ODBC driver starting from version 3.0, likely to accommodate modifications in the Firebird API from FB 3.0 onwards. Specifically, it appears that BLOB fetching behavior changed from a “full fetch” (loading the entire BLOB when opening the dataset) to a pointer/reference-based mechanism.

We would like to:

Confirm whether this change in BLOB fetching is indeed the expected behavior of the Firebird 3.0+ ODBC driver.

Ask if there is any way to configure or modify the ODBC driver so that it behaves like the previous version (ODBC 2.0 + FB 2.5), where BLOBs were fully fetched automatically when RequestLive = true.

Any guidance or suggestions to handle this scenario in Delphi 7 with BDE + ODBC would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help!