At 08:44 PM 12/04/2004 -0300, you wrote:

>I have developed an aplication in VB6 that uses a DB with Firebird 1.5
>with ODBC and i have a few questions:
>
>1) how can i do to manage the message of an exception with ADO?

Good place to ask about this would be the firebird-vb (yahoo) list and the
firebird-net-provider (sourceforge) list. Get the subscription addresses
from the Lists and Newsgroups directory at www.firebirdsql.org

>2) how can i do to manage de errors messages of Firebird in my app?

It depends on what you are using to process the structures returned through
the API. If you are using ODBC, the driver should have a standard way of
delivering the error status vector to your application interface.

>3) i tried to compact de database using gbak (as i read in a FAQ - doing
>backup and restore), but it doesn't work. It looks like everything is fine
>with no errors in verbose mode, but the resulting file (for ex: MYDB.GBK)
>doesn't have a format supported by Firebird when i rename it to MYDB.GDB.

The gbk file is not a database file, it is a backup file. To get the
"compaction", use gbak -c to recreate the database fresh and brand
new. Study the section on gbak in the Borland OpGuide.pdf for this.

"Compaction" is not a task you really have to do very much with
Firebird. It takes care of its own garbage collection and frees up space
itself. Most people would do a restore (i.e. gbak -c) once every six
months or so, just to get everything back to "ground zero". Some databases
are **never** restored because they are simply too big.

As long as you take care to commit transactions cleanly and perform regular
sweeps, there is no reason to think about "compacting the
database". That's an old-fashioned concept that belongs in Noah's Ark with
dBase and floppy disks.

/heLen