Hi Svein,

Answers inline.....

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Svein Erling"
<svein.erling.tysvaer@k...> wrote:

> Hi again, Leslie!

> 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.

The middleware knows it is an SQL database, what it doesn't currently
know is the data type of a particular field. I have already started
making the changes to determine this. Once known I can then convert
the value of any field into any format I want. This will resolve my
problem and will also make things more flexible for future expansion.

> 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.

I have no problem with what you are saying because only the Client
can know the date format. However, there should be a mechansim to
allow the Client to set the Date format for a particular session or
at the very worst case per SQL statement so that the server and
client are talking the same language. The actual storage format of
the date is irrelevant.

>
> 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).

Agreed. Internally they are not being treated entirely different.
The actual problem is to retain the same interface for external
applications so that I can change databases without the need for a
single line of code to change in the application. In other words I
need to be fully backwards compatible.

Leslie.