<<I attended a release presentation for D8 last week. The Borland guys
slammed Firebird, taking every opportunity to point out how "unreliable" it
was when compared to the latest version of Interbase.>>

Oh wow - what a compliment :-) For the last couple of years the public
approach has been to ignore Firebird since it wasn't a competitor, nor was
it
ever likely to be.

Who did the presentation, and where was it?

Mind you - looking at the list of crash bugs that Borland have attempted to
fix
in the recent 7.1 SP2 release, I think this is a little rich, a bit like the
pot calling the kettle black.

Regards
Paul