hi
ive not visited this forum in quite a while now because i was done
with my college project, but now my professor came to me and asked if
i'd be ready to rework my application and exhibit it at the 2008 cebit
at my college's stand and i said yes so now i'm a bit unsure what to
do, i wrote the whole application with firebird 1.5 and i suppose i'd
have to change many things if i were to use firebird 2.0 instead. my
main concerns are as follows:
1) i have written an application that enables the user to pick unicode
characters (or character strings) and place them into a 255-entries
table and builds a unicode_fss collation for the user which he can use
in his databases. 4 such user-defined collations can be built into the
same fbintl2.dll, and i pretty much followed this guide to build this
application:
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_collation
I am wondering whether I will be able to do something similar with
Firebird 2. Will I be able to define my own collations? Or are there
many unicode collations for many different languages already available
in firebird 2? for my application it is absolutely necessary that
there may be tables where one column uses a different (unicode)
collation than the other.
2) are there any good database access components for firebird 2
available for delphi? these of course need to have support for unicode
as well. i remember that this was a real pain, as some functions
wouldnt work properly with one set of components and then another
functionality wasnt properly implemented in the other or they didnt
support unicode and all that, so i really dont know whether i should
dare use firebird 2. if you think there are no good components for
delphi, what language is best to connect to firebird 2, in your view??
3)the application as it is now can only be used in connection with a
windows server because the collations dll which the user builds
himself runs only on windows but it would of course be better to be
able to have firebird run on linux or windows or whatever platform, so
it would also be interesting to know if there is a way to meet all my
needs plus make it platform independent
any directions would be greatly appreciated

martin