> -----Original Message-----
> From: johnlim@... [mailto:johnlim@...]
> Sent: Sábado 24 de Junio de 2000 9:22
>
> 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.

Then you are invited to join the new IB-Conversions emailing list, send a
mail to
MAILTO:IB-Conversions-subscribe@egroups.com
to subscribe. It's a very low traffic list for now. Indeed, we still don't
start.

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

Not directly, but the collation artifacts support them.

> 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.

Interbase DOES support it. The only problem is several functionality does
not appear in the DSQL interface, but it's here. It's a matter to enhance
the DSQL parser.

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

Interbase is ANSI-SQL almost completely. As always, uncle Gates prefers to
use his "enhanced" versions. The ANSI concat is the double vertical pipe.

> 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.

It's workable after some initial pain.

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

I use both SW. I have some experience. Helen has some experience. This is
why we started a new list for these issues.

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

Not sure if it's for Latin-1, but most probably. It's not 100% finished. I
would like to put pressure on that person to finish his work, but he has
other priorities for now. He started when IB was a commercial product with
licenses... he now needs to rethink such effort. I suspect the initial idea
was to charge a low fee for the code since IB itself was not free.

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

That's te basic idea. However, I think the draft calls for some extensions,
not 100% sure.

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

IB itself is compiled with MS product in the Windows platform, so I don't
have a reason to think MSVC++ is not supported in the kit.

C.