At 11:36 AM 08-02-02 +1000, M Patterson wrote:

>But then will be able to use the IBX components? Let's not get all bitter and
>twisted about Borland. I'm trying to write a program with IBX / Interbase on my
>machine, my colleague is running an app that integrates my code on a machine
>running Firebird, and we would like to be able to offer Firebird to customers,
>or Interbase if they want paid support.

No, let's not get all bitter and twisted about Borland (and I didn't think Lester was) -- just let's be realistic and accept that Borland has a commercial product to sell, that it perceives as being under competitive threat from Firebird. It's doing what its management deems necessary to beat the competition. Contrarily, don't you seem slightly bitter and twisted about the Firebird developers' choice not to hold back Firebird development in order to keep it compatible with IBX?

Current facts (value-free) are:
a) Borland Corp publicly expressed policy is to withhold the changes applied to their proprietary fork of the code
and
b) the InterBase(R) interests are declining to accept (or even comment on) Firebird-compatibility patches for IBX
and
c) at least two third-party developers of DB connectivity components have publicly undertaken to support both InterBase(R) and Firebird

It seems pretty obvious that, if you want to support both IB and FB, you probably need to regard IBX as a three-legged horse. I guess if it's important enough to you, there's nothing to stop you commissioning someone to take up the IBX code and make a compatible fork. It might just be slightly cheaper for you to buy licensing for FIBPlus or IB Objects though.

>I've heard that from IB 6.5 you can cancel a long running query. That's a fairly
>new feature, doesn't sound all that difficult to implement

Well, it took the InterBase(R) team nearly a year and a half to produce a sub-release with this as the single feature of differentiation from the open source code...

It isn't as trivial as you seem to think - otherwise it would have been done years ago. Heck, it would be in Firebird already...But, if it's such a good thing, then it would be a great example of a Firebird enhancement that a user-customer could provide funding for...alternatively, you could wait and see if some capable programmer has a bunch of free time to donate to a very pervasive change to FB 1.x...or wait for FB 2...

cheers,
Helen

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Firebird Open SQL Database · http://firebirdsql.org
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