Hello everyone,

We have an Web based application running on MS SQL Server 7.0 that we
are considering porting to Interbase 6 because of the free licensing.

I am not an expert on Interbase but have identified the following
issues:

1. Interbase does not support case-insensitive comparisons, except
through extensions such as CONTAINS.

2. Interbase does not support the TOP extension to SELECT, as in
SELECT TOP 10 * FROM PRODUCTS. This is needed by some 3rd party
libraries we are using.

3. Interbase uses || for string concat, SQL Server uses +.

I am sure there are other differences that I am not aware of. Only
issue (1), case in-sensitivity is show-stopper to us. We can live
with the other differences.

Some Questions
--------------

Has anyone have any experience porting from MS SQL Server to
Interbase?

Has anyone developed a case-insensitive character set for Interbase
for ISO Latin-1 ?

Can we develop such a character set with the new Interbase 6
collation kit?

Will the collation kit support Visual C++? We don't own a copy of
Borland C++.

Thanks again
John Lim