Jocelyn,

J> Killing a process will terminate it gracefully ?

Calling TerminateProcess won't cause a graceful shutdown, if this is
what you are after. If your firebird-server-running-as-an-application
has a window handle (see the conf file to check if it does) you can
send a WM_CLOSE message to it and it will shut down gracefully. This
is equivalent to closing it through the tray icon's menu. If it
doesn't (as is common when the setup needs to be transparent or
support several instances), then AFAIK you're out of luck. I have
cases in which the fbserver process is spawned by my application at
startup and terminated at shutdown. In such cases I take precautions
not to terminate it when there's a chance it's doing anything to my
data. I close all connections and backup the data. Database shutdown
is also a good option on Fb 2.0+. This is certainly far from the
usual way to use a RDBMS in general and Firebird in particular, but
it might be close to what you have there.

J> being a 3-tier application this would be a little trickie.

If you have a middle tier then why don't you use fbembed? You'll
still need all the precautions, though.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
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