Hi Augey,

> The symptoms we were having before revolved mostly around data
> corruption. One thing that is believed may have caused these issues
> is from support personell copying the various .gdb files either while
> transactions were in progress or without the InterBase service being
> shutdown.

I think that you can't avoid this kind of problems. I'm quite sure that
the destination gdb file will be corrupted. What does Sybase to control
this ?

> Another cause may have been from physically switching off
> machines presumably during some sort of transactions.

Interbase defaults to Force Writes OFF, that's the biggest cause of
corruption due to power off / switching off. Firebird defaults to ON,
but if you use Firebird with a Interbase database it will still OFF
(this is a database parameter).

> The company moved to Sybase due to its superior transaction control (...)

The cause of problems that you report aren't related to transaction
control (and I really doubt that Sysbase has superior transaction control).

> My questions are:

I will skip your questions, and give you one:

- Can you avoid that your users copy the database? I don't see any
reason for a user to copy the database while someone is working on it.

- What is the OS system that your users will use? I think that will be
windows, but what version? When you use Force Writes ON, it's up to the
operating system to flush the cache to disk.

>> Our machines around the country cannot be guaranteed to stay up or
>> never be shut down inappropriately

It's very hard to work on this conditions, to any database. :-(


Artur