--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Alan McDonald" <alan@...> wrote:

>
> > 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
>
> basic question - if it all works in 1.5, Why on earth is there a need to
> change it to 2?
> Alan
>

because 1.5 did have its drawbacks. for example, i would have liked to
create a combined index over a 80-character-wide unicode_fss field and
another field which wasn't possible with firebird 1.5 and i think this
is now possible..