I'm quite unused to firebird's apparent use of uppercase letters for
field names etc. Is this an acutal requirement, or is it optional?
What about firebird 2? If it's a requirement, why...don't like it any
more than I would if I was forced to type this msg in uppercase.
Varying case helps so much with names:

tblItem
tblItem.ItemID
tblItem.ItemName

Much nicer than

TBL_ITEM
TBL_ITEM.ITEMID
TBL_ITEM.ITEMNAME

Feels like using dBase...

I have the firebird book (as an ebook, what a mistake!) but I can't
find any reference to this topic there at all.