At 11:41 AM 04-12-02 -0500, you wrote:

>We developed all our in-house business systems using Delphi 2.0 and third
>party
>VCL's and Borland's BDE. Our hardware consists of an NT 4.0 server and 7
>workstations running Windows 95. It has served us well for the past 10
>years and are in
>no hurry to convert. However, since we may be upgrading certain of our
>workstations to
>either Win2000 or XPPro and have heard that there may be issues involved in
>running D2 and the BDE on these OS's, we are in the process of determining
>what RDMS and
>developement software we should migrate to. One big question we need to
>answer is,
>"What is the best way to learn SQL?". We understand that the speed of
>Interbase is very good and will want to use it or Firebird. We also would
>like suggestions as to which IDE to use in developement. Thanks in advance
>for any advice.

Wayne,
Issues about the compatibility of Delphi and the BDE with OSs is right
off-topic for this list, which is about converting from other RDBMSs to
Firebird (or IB 6 if you must). You should raise this question in the
appropriate Borland delphi newsgroup.

As to using the BDE with Fb or IB6, it has been deprecated for
client/server RDBMSs such that the last BDE driver ever for IB6 is 5.2,
which shipped with Delphi 6. It works more or less correctly with Dialect
1 Fb/IB databases but has several problems with Dialect 3.

Borl has replaced the BDE with DBXpress. If you decide to go the DBXpress
way, you can purchase a Firebird driver from www.upscene.com

There are copious IDE options with Firebird: for Delphi and BCPPB you have
IB Objects, FIBPlus, SQLDirect and also InterBaseXpress
(marginally). Fb/IB libraries are available for PHP4, Python and
Perl. One can also program directly to the API.

Re SQL: you can pick up documentation about the Fb/IB implementation of
SQL from the IB Phoenix website (www.ibphoenix.com) and you will need a
good book about SQL-92 standard SQL. Browse the book list at
www.ibobjects.com for some recommendations that other IB/Fb users have
found useful. Get hold of a GUI client and experiment like crazy. Any
problems you encounter, you can take to our ib-support list.

regards,
Helen