Hi Paul,

>>Our company has developed a desktop application which uses Firebird as
>>its local database. (The application is NOT client/server. However
>>we decided to use Firebird for its capabilities.)
>>
>
> You might want to think about this, suppose a customer wants to run copies on 4
> different PC's and colaborate on the data, the idea that you could make one
> machine a server, and have the other 3 use it, can be a big selling feature, and
> could mean selling multiple licences. The ability for the customer to install FB
> server on an existing WinNT, Win2K, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, FreeBSD or Mac
> OS-X (apologies to any platform I missed) server machine and pointing the
> workstations to the server, extends your market, without requiring a large time-
> investment on your part. Hint, you add a couple of registry entries, to identify the
> server and database path.

Actually we already do this. Its just that most of our customers will
not be interested in this. The few who want to this can. What I meant
to say was that we could have used a Local Database solution however we
decided to use Firebird instead (mainly because we can use it for both
our multi-tier work and Local DB solutions).

>>We are now looking at the installation of the application. Our
>
> There are really only a couple of components that you need, gds32.dll and some
> registry entries regarding the current version stuff. Unless you need the high
> powered features of Wise or Installshield, Inno seems to work well and the scripts
> are available on line (or they are supposed to be).

We are looking at Inno now.

>>Also it is possible that some of our customers will already have
>>Interbase installed (maybe for other applications). We would not want
>>to affect their existing Interbase installation. How do we make
>>Firebird and Interbase run side by side? Or should we just use the
>>existing Interbase installation (we use Delphi DBExpress to access the
>>database)?
>>
>
> You can't, there are two problems, one is the above named gds32.dll, this file needs
> to be overwritten in order to install Firebird. You could simply overwrite this file,
> except for one small problem, the ambiguous field bug, which Firebird fixes, but
> Interbase doesn't (so far). The problem is this:
>

We never want to overwrite this file! (See my previous email for
reasons.) We will simply use the existing IB installation if it is
detected. We are still using Dialect 1 so we should be fine (I
believe). For this reason, probably the best thing for us is to
continue using Dialect 1 until Firebird can run side by side with IB.

Thanks for you comments.

Paul Klink
Paritech