kokhoor wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am new to Firebird and am a convert from Microsoft
> SQL Server. Thanks to the fact that Firebird is platform-
> independent.

Welcome. I also migrated one of my production databases from MSSQL to FB
some 4 months ago. (It's not big, has about 80 tables).

>
> I have faced a few problems when I am porting my
> database from SQL Server to Firebird.

Me too. ;)

>
> 1) In Microsoft SQL Server, there is an option to set
> string searches to be case-insensitive for the entire database.
> So, where clauses like those written below works:
>
> WHERE id = 'name' (returns rows with id = 'name', 'Name', 'NAME')
> WHERE id like '%name%' (returns rows with id
> = 'mYname', 'NameMe', 'NAME')
>
> Besides using WHERE upper(id) = upper('name'), is there any
> alternative options for setting a field, a table or a database
> to be case-insensitive?

AFAIK, For equality you have to use UPPER. LIKE case is better, you can
use CONTAINING which is case insensitive and behaves like: LIKE '%name%'

So:

WHERE id CONTAINING 'name' (returns same as WHERE id LIKE '%name%')

>
> 2) Is there an isnull(evalValue, ifnull) functionality in
> Firebird? The isnull function returns the value stored in ifnull
> when the evalValue is null.

There are few, availability depends on your OS. I use FB on both Windows
and Linux. You can find third-party UDFs that will do the job for you on
both platforms. Since in 99.99% of cases I just want NULL to be
converted to zero, I use z() function from rfunc library:

> For example,
>
> SELECT id, name, isnull(amount, 0) as amount from account;

turns to:

SELECT id, name, z(amount) as amount from account;

> 3) There is a length limit to field names, constraint names and
> table names. Any way to extend that limit?

I haven't had trouble with this one, and don't know the answer, so
someone else might help you.

> Regards,
> Kok Hoor
> SolutionX Software Sdn. Bhd.

Good luck with your migration.

BTW, you can tell us which operating system are you running.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://fbexport.sourceforge.net