Hi Reggie,

Well at least your gripe about IB was something reasonably obscure
whereas this goes to the heart of using stored procs.

I haven't heard anyone else complain that coding stored procs with IB
is a headache... am I being unreasonable or does noone use PSQL for
any kind of arithmetic?

The reason it annoys me so much is that FB/IB excels in most other
areas. Just seems weird that in the past decade nobody at Borland
thought about making the PSQL more like Delphi, e.g. you don't have
to explicitly typecast every darn constant and variable... oh wait,
you do with Delphi, kind of :-)

The solution with IB's PSQL would appear to be reasonably simple:
declare *all* variables and constants in the header and use no
undeclared values/constants in the body. And declare all numbers as
double precision if there is anything but basic integer add/subtract
in the arithmetic.

Still, as a filing cabinet IB is wonderful; as a calculator it
sucks. I was hoping to implement a lot of fairly complex PSQL stuff,
but I'm no longer confident IB can easily handle it. I don't want to
spend hours debugging procedures only to discover I'd forgotten to
typecast x * 3 as CAST(x as double precision) * CAST(3 as double
precision). I'd be thrilled to be shown how I'm wrong about this...

This coupled with the bizarre plan-selection issue makes me think
twice about going ahead with IB. It's starting to look like I'll
need to have a bag full of kludges to overcome some of these issues.
I really want to stick with FB for many, many reasons -- not least
being that I've invested the past 5 months of my time learning it.

I love Firebird to death, which is why I hate to whinge about it. If
somebody gives you a fine car for free you don't complain about not
liking the colour. And god knows the list of fixed 'issues' in MSSQL
reads like a phone book every time they do a patch. But intuitive
use is a big factor...

Probably doesn't help that I was poleaxed with a migraine last night
after seeing Star Wars a second time :-)

Regards
Andrew Ferguson
-- Invisible slogan follows: .

--- In ib-support@y..., "Reggie White" <reggiewhite@l...> wrote:
> We have already left and gone to MSSQL.
> Still keeping an eye on Firebird, but I don't have much faith.
>
> (P.S. Hell is not that bad once it has been frozen over)
>