> I am currently looking at Firebird and MS SQL 2000 as a database
> choice. We are currently looking at some new ERP software which

one

You can download Jdbc and/or dotNET drivers from sourceforge site. I
havent used ODBC and OLEDB drivers. Jdbc driver works ok.

Been testing dotNETProvider only lately, works ok, but havent done
any throughly testings with blobs and similar issues.

This page (but a bit outdated now) has a migration guide and it will
give few points where functionality differs.
http://www.xlprueba.com.ar/ib/defaulthtml/ch01.html

Overall SQL2K package has an enterprise quality admin tools +
documentation, where as Firebird dont have anything but a commandline
tools and lack of detailed documentation. You must find admin tools
(+good documentation) from the community network.

Overall Firebird functionality as a plain dbserver is excellent.
Currently I only struggle with a proper unicode support. It does have
a unicode support, but then lacks few fundamental issues.
* UPPER function (and maybe other str function) works on ascii chars
only
* Unicode column charset does not handle char(LEN)/varchar(LEN)
column length properly from character point of view. See
http://koti.mbnet.fi/akini/ib/unicode.html

When this issue is solved then it's the best dbserver in the world :-)