Laravel-Firebird (Benson Fork)
TL;DR
We started from an already working, mature Firebird driver for Laravel and brought it to real parity with the first-party drivers (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server). The result: from an estimated ~51% to ~96% functional parity, 216 tests running against Firebird 3, 4 and 5 (dialects 1 and 3), ~87% line coverage, and a green CI across the whole matrix (PHP 8.3/8.4 × Firebird 3/4/5).
This write-up is for people who live and breathe Firebird — the details below are engine-specific.
The codebase it builds on
benson/laravel-firebird is a fork of harrygulliford/laravel-firebird, which itself descends from the pioneering jacquestvanzuydam/laravel-firebird. Much of the foundation (query grammar, schema grammar, Eloquent integration, FIRST/SKIP pagination, INSERT ... RETURNING, MERGE-based upsert, join mutations via RDB$DB_KEY) already came from that prior work. What we describe here is the refinement and parity layer we built on top of that base.
Why it matters
Firebird has quirks no generic ORM handles on its own: case-sensitive identifiers when quoted, DATE with no time part in dialect 3, NUMERIC/DECIMAL stored as a scaled integer, no lastInsertId(), dialect 1 without delimited identifiers… each one can become a silent production bug. We tackled them head-on.
Real, Firebird-specific bug fixes
1. Scale loss on DECIMAL/NUMERIC (the nastiest one).
Inserting the PHP integer 40 into a DECIMAL(5,2) column stored 0.40 — off by 100×. Cause: Laravel binds integers with PDO::PARAM_INT, and pdo_firebird treats them as the column’s raw scaled value. We now bind integers as PARAM_STR, and Firebird converts the literal to the column type with the correct scale. Strings, floats, where clauses and booleans stay untouched.
2. dropAllTables() with legacy uppercase names.
Tables created without quotes live in UPPERCASE in the catalog (AUDITORIA). Introspection returned the name lowercased, and DROP TABLE "auditoria" failed with -607 Table does not exist. Dropping now uses the real catalog name, working for lowercase (quoted), UPPERCASE (legacy) and mixed-case tables in the same database.
3. date cast triggering conversion errors.
In dialect 3, DATE has no time. Laravel formats every date as Y-m-d H:i:s, and Firebird rejected it with -413 conversion error from string. We ship a SerializesFirebirdDates trait (and a base model) that stores date columns without the time component while keeping datetime intact — using the cast you already declare.
4. exists() over UNION queries.FIRST 1 was applied only to the first union branch. We now wrap the query in a derived table before limiting.
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