> I must admit it seems rather odd to me that you insert the value as
> '15:00:00' and it is displayed from the DB as '3:00:00 PM'--why not display
> it as it was entered?

No, it is not displayed *from the DB* as '3:00:00 PM',
it is your application that does the formatting.

Firebird sends the result to client either in binary time format
(which is integer), or (if asked e.g. by CAST) as string
(in which case the result will be '15:00:00.0000', never am/pm)

Ivan