> I've been completely ignorant about Delphi so far. I searched the
> archives and got some bits and pieces of information, but I'd like to
> hear your opinions and experiences.
>
> What is the best way to access Firebird from Delphi?
>
> If there are freeware/open source solutions they might have an edge,
> but I'm also interested in commercial ones. A set of short advices
> like 'XXX is good and free, but YYY feature doesn't work with it' is a
> kind of stuff I'm interested in.
>

Hi,
I have experience with FIBPlus http://www.devrace.com/en/fibplus/ and have
played with IBDAC http://crlab.com/ibdac/
for a while. Both products are commercial, VCL based and use native
connection to firebird (no odbc, bde, etc required).
Both products implement their query components that inherit from VCL's
TDataSet class so they work with any
visual VCL component that can link to TDataSource.
Although I haven't actually used crlab's components for IB/FB, I have worked
a lot with MySQL version which
works quite well. The IB/FB should work well too, but aside from testing the
trial version I can't say more.

As for devrace, which I actually used for firebird development, it just
works the way you expect it to. It has some nice
features like conditional runtime building of queries, helps a lot with
transaction handling, and a lots of other details that help
a lot in development. I recommend you browse thru their articles and FAQ
sections at http://www.devrace.com/en/fibplus/articles/
where you can learn a lot about it.
I have also run a couple of tests with FB 2.1 alpha and it works too (I have
been playing around with CTE and it worked).
Basically, from my experience you will not find any "feature" that does not
work. Those components are simply wrappers
around API so they just forward queries to the server.

Just my two cents...

Sasha