I have a question on how to best deal with the potential of multiple
versions of the Firebird server residing on the same machine, and how
to best deal with it.

This is my situation:

We are planning to ship a suite of desktop software products that will
also install Firebird 2.0 SS on the desktop. All of the applications
will require access to the database(s) hosted locally.

We initially thought about using the embedded version of the database,
but since we want to have multiple applications access this database,
we need to install the SS (or CS) version instead.

The nature of our products is that the user really has no idea that
Firebird is even on the system; they are really just using our
products which happen to use a local Firebird database in the
background. Therefore the existence and maintenance of Firebird itself
needs to be 'silent' as far as the user is concerned.

Of course, we would like to play properly in the 'sandbox', so we need
to deal with the scenario where FB 2.0 is already installed by another
application, OR if an earlier version of FB (1.5 for example) is
installed.

If FB 2.0 is already there, then how do we use this when we likely
won't know the credentials to add our own user information for the
server? Can we run 2 or more servers side-by-side? Can the local (i.e.
XNET) protocol be used in this case for performance reasons?

We also need to deal with the situation where FB 1.5 (or earlier) is
also installed. How do we implement this to allow existing clients not
to be disrupted by our installation?

What would be the set of 'best practices' for this scenario?

Thx!

Greg