Hi,
I'm just sort of starting to reach a little farther with Firebird. Up
to now, I have pretty much limited my activities to simple
Insert, Update and Select activities in my database. Now I'm starting
to check out the selectable stored procedures. This is a pretty slick
feature. I just finished a little procedure that I use with
Fast-Reports to print checks. If you select from the procedure while
giving it a zero parameter, it returns the next check number from the
Bank record. If you give it a non-zero parameter, it returns that
same number to you as the next check number and updates the Bank to
start the numbering there. It also updates the payable with the check
number. That's nice.

My question is this. I really like this power but I spent a fair
amount of time debugging the procedure. I learned one little trick
while I was developing it but I'll bet there are some things that some
of the more experienced developers are doing that won't be apparent to
me for a long time, if ever. Have you come up with any tricks for
debugging stored procedures that help you a lot? Do you have any UDFs
that you use to help in debugging? Do you do anything
different with triggers? Or, maybe a little simpler, do you have a
simple rule for when you use a colon with a variable and when you don't?

Thanks for any help.

-Jack