At 08:41 PM 12/06/2003 +0000, you wrote:

> >
> > Forget about the share. Use a connect string like:
> > <servername or IP-address>:<drive>:\<full path>\<database name>
> > e.g.
> > THESERVER:D:\DB_AREA\mydatabase.gdb
>
>That makes sense. We were never given any documentation with this, so
>I've had to learn everything by butting my head against it, hitting
>it with sticks, or asking questions when I can't figure it out. <grin>

Documentation for IB6 - buy from Borland, or use the free beta docs from
the Downloads > InterBase page of www.ibphoenix.com - about 8 Mb in toto -
and the book you most need right now is the Operations Guide.

From the ibphoenix site you can also download the Firebird Quickstart
Guide, which is 99% applicable to IB 6 (though it's not a Delphi or BDE
document). That's found on Downloads > Main Downloads.

Did you realise that you can't deploy a BDE app without installing the BDE
on the clients? There's quite a bit of network setup to do for the BDE
itself, even before you start working down the driver layers. If the app
uses the Borland ODBC (Visigenic) driver, it sits atop the BDE and the
clients will need it too. (It should install with the BDE).

If this is news to you, some good starting places would be
- the help text for the bdeconfig utility and the file BDEDEPLOY.TXT (found
near the BDE installation files on your development machine)
- search the Borl developer site for "BDE" and "deploy" - there were
several papers available in the past, though in recent cleanups in the Borl
knowledgebases some of the useful older docs seem to have gone AWOL. (The
BDE is really obsolete for IB 6...)
- join the public.delphi.database newsgroup at news://forums.borland.com
and ask for links to white papers
- join the elists.org delphi-db mailing list
<http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi-db>

Helen