Firebird has some funny ways of handling passwords. The maximum length of passwords that is evaluated is 8 characters. Every character after the 8th is silently ignored. That’s especially funny because the ‘default’ password for a Firebird-installation is ‘masterkey’, which has 9 characters. You can, however, successfully log in to freshly installed Firebird-servers providing the password ‘masterke’.
I’m working with Interbase and Firebird for more than four years and just now realized that when a co-worker at our company found it out while learning SQL.
The only program that I know that makes note of that is gsec, which prints a warning when setting the password to something longer than 8 characters.
http://daniel-albuschat.blogspot.com/2008/04/passwords-in-firebird.html
[ED:Daniel is working on webkit based browser named arrora ]