Hi again, Leslie!

You'd be surprised to learn that dd.mm.yyyy is actually the most
common format where I live (Norway, and it's only real "competitor"
dd/mm-yyyy is mainly used in handwriting).

You may have to make your middleware aware of what type of data it is
dealing with. After preparing your SQL statement, whatever tool you
use to access Firebird ought to know the type of its parameters.
Reading this information, you should be able to use <Parameter>.
AsDateTime:=dd/mm/yyyy (or equivalent) when suitable (provided the
shortstringformat is correctly set at the client). Some tools even
recognise <Parameter>.Variant.

I do think that the date format belongs to the client and not the
server, and that allowing this to be set at the database level could
cause as many problems as it solves.

By the way, Firebird is way different from any desktop database like
Paradox and treating them as equals you will get a few surprises
(positively and negatively).

HTH,
Set