Rafael,

R> Currently I am working on convincing my company to switch from MSDE to FB as a
R> backend for one of our products. Expected deployments: 20.000, expected number
R> of clients 1-25 per deployemnt. Our customers have no clue what ctrl-alt-del is
R> let allone what the SYSDBA password would be.

Same scenario here.

R> As you can imagine, if we don't
R> play nice and nuke somebodys FB install in order to install our application, we
R> will make a lot of unahppy developers :-) On the other hand if we dont do it
R> then we shoot ourselfs in the foot, bacause the customer won't be able to use
R> our software and will switch to the competition. (and guess what a for-profit
R> company will do :-)?)

We are about to replace our IB5.6/BDE installations with a new version
that uses Fb1.5 and a mixed 2/3 tier architecture. This is going to be
the last time we ship CDs or send people to install the application to
the customers. All further upgrading will have to go through an
automated process over the internet.

To achieve this, we are going to "embed" the firebird server into our
own server application. We won't be using *anything* from an existing
Firebird installation, so hopefully we won't be having compatibility
problems. We need to be able to replace the whole Firebird 1.5 that we
are using with 1.5.1, or whatever when it comes out, and this looks
like the most viable solution. When (if ;-)) our application gets
uninstalled, then its Firebird server follows automatically. If people
want Firebird on a machine in which our server application is already
installed, then they install Firebird. "Ours" is not available to the
outer world.

If there was a way to talk wire protocol with the embedded server,
then I would be using fbembed and nothing else, but unfortunately that
isn't possible. My client app needs to talk to the server so I cannot
use the pure 3-tier approach. I'll install a "private" Firebird, have
it listen on port 323523 or whatever, and never let anyone know
(except from the IPL licence popped up at installation time and the
"powered by firebird" logo, of course).

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
mailto:nandod@...
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