> Probably the sane way to handle that is through the services interface.

Thanks for waking me up. I've been using IBDAC components for my app development, but completely forgot they supply a nice array of Services components. Never used them, but I'm about to learn. Thanks.

>In the ancient days when InterBase ran on VAX/VMS, Ultrix, Apollo Aegis, whatever ...

I remember those days all too well. Worked on CDC hardware and wrote code before FORTRAN was followed by numbers (like 77 etc). Unfortunately, never used InterBase. CDC had their own stuff.