Hi Ann,

There still seems to be quite a bit of uncertainty (and a **large** amount
of uneasyness) among the several of users (and vendor) of ASTA and Interbase
regarding the thread safety issue of gds32.dll. In fact the inability of
**anybody** to give a thorough explanation of the problem and steps to take
in implementing an application that will not be compromised by this issue is
giving people a reason to think about options other than InterBase/Firebird.
It has certainly made life very difficult for the ASTA folks and if you
search their list on yahoogroups, you will see several repeated threads on
the issue...and you will also notice that to this day (a for the last
several months) nobody really can characterize the problem (in a way that is
clear to the developer), nor can anybody offer a really sound solution
(though I have suggested that always connecting with severname:path, i.e.
using the remote interface appears to be the suggested method of avoiding
the issue).

In short, the knowledge that the problem exists, the lack of knowledge of
the issues, and no clear guidelines on how to avoid the potential problem,
is hurting InterBase/Firebird...and I'll speculate, not trivially. This
lack of knowledge is not confined to "newbies" or even people such as myself
who are relatively high-level programmers with little to no knowledge of
database engine internals, but also includes people long involved with
interbase at a very fundamental level.

Can someone with the appropriate knowledge create a short white paper on the
problem? I would be more than happy to review it, but I do not have the
knowledge to create it.

It is perceived as a serious issue by many people using and supporting IB/FB
and appears to have had no resolution or attention for many months. I have
been unable to find it in the firebird bug list as of a couple of months
ago. In an earlier e-versation we had, I beleive you suggested that problem
would be fairly straightforward (for Jim) to resolve, but he had other
commitments. If this is the case then perhaps he could advise the firebird
development team on its solution???

thanks

Rob Schuff