Hi all.

First, some unfinished business from a prior email:

The new CURRENT_USER... how does this differ from USER? Couldn't find detailed info in the RC2 notes (early days, I know!).

Second, I'm at the point where I need to settle on an IB development environment. FB for server, of course, but what about Delphi + IB components... your thoughts from experience and expectations much appreciated...

(1) D6 + inbuilt IBX? Obviously this is pretty safe for interim use, but probably a limited lifespan given "the Fork" ("the forking" -- whatever you want to call it);

(2) D3-6 + IBObjects? This is my dream setup, but unfortunately $800AUD is pretty steep;

(3) D3-6 + FIBPlus? If FIBPlus is indeed on par or close to IBObjects then, at half the price, this seems a good compromise.

(4) D3-6 + FIB? Limited to dialect 1 forever, of course, but at no cost outlay, who can complain. I've used FIB and like it a lot (which, again, nudges me toward FIBPlus).

Finally, in dealing with dates and times in dialect 1... I've been trying to find out if there's an easy way to split TIMESTAMP into corresponding date and time field components. As far as I can tell (and I'm a newbie so apologies) the only way to do that is via the isc_etc hands-on C coding (complete newbie here)?? I would have thought there were a couple of UDFs to handle this, but I haven't found one after digging through the three or four UDF DLL's that I'm aware of (IB_UDF, FB_UDF, etc). Did I miss something? Is it something easily done at the byte level? I'll be searching some more so hopefully I'll have found the key to all this soon, but don't let that stop you from enlightening me right now...

Thanks,
Andrew Ferguson



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