After using IB/FB for 10years+ and at the risk of repeating that
stated before, showing my ignorance or saying something that has
already been attended to...

Great a engine as it is, FB has (in my view) the following weaknesses:

1. Lack of Internal set of system functions automatically available to
all databases. (These would be considered seperate, and *in addition*
to the good UDF support)

2. The ludicrous situation of having to create 'shadow' columns +
BI/BU triggers in order to provide case-insensitive searches.

It always intriged me how MSSQL, Sysbase, Watcom, etc had a single
setting to determine case-insensitivity across the entire DB. Whilst
looking in this tonight I created a blank DB in MSSQL and it turns out
that it uses a default setting from the registry:

HKLM\software\microsoft\mssqlserver\mssqlserver\DefaultCollationName
is 'Latin1_General_CI_AS' and this is *case-insensitive* by default.

Can we pleeeeaaaase have this option at database creation time also?

3. Domains *used throughout entire system* would be great.

4. Views where you don't have to specify return datatypes.

5. The ability to turn off the 'bitmapping' of multiple indexes.

6. Default GUI tools on each platform.

7. Export DUMP options to SQL statements, XML, etc

Thanks for the great work,
Tom