Background:

I am developing a GIS application for Win32 in Delphi XE using TatukGIS VCL DK 10 and Firebird 1.5. I save large aerial photography files as SQL Layers (BLOBs) using Tatuk's PixelStore format. Many of my users are remote, and hit against my server to load layers. At this point I provide access to the SQL Layers through ODBC. The speed for people accessing them from beyond my firewall is not great and I need to improve it if possible.

Questions:

1) Is ODBC the way to go here, or should I use another driver, like DBX?

2) Would I see an improvement in speed by using a more modern version of Firebird?


Thanks