At 10:58 AM 2/03/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I am currently working on a project where the company is using Interbase as
>its development environment and have asked me to extract information from
>the database. I don't have a copy of Interbase but have come across Firebird
>which is apparently compatible with IB. The company have given me the gdb
>file that contains the IB database. How do I import this into Firebird (into
>an .fdb?)

If it is IB 6.5 or lower, you should be able to log into it directly. It
doesn't have to be renamed (Firebird doesn't care what its name is),
although on a Windows XP system you should rename it, because XP does nasty
things to files with the extension of ".gdb".

It depends on what version of IB it is. It's essential to find out.

>Are there any commands/tools to achieve this quickly and
>painlessly.

The first thing you need to do (assuming you have a Firebird server
installed) is to find out the On-disk Structure version of the
database. Assuming you're on Windows (are you?) and the database file is
d:\data\MyDB.gdb....(substitute appropriately)...

Open a CMD window and go to c:\Program Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin.

Do this:

gstat -h d:\data\MyDB.gdb -user sysdba -password masterkey

A display appears that tells you some stuff from the header page of the
database. Look for ODS version. If it is 10.0 or lower, then you should
be able to connect to it.

Another thing you are interested in is SQL Dialect. If it is dialect 1,
many tools need to be told to use Dialect 1.

Given that the db has the suffix ".gdb" one can be reasonably hopeful it's
not recently created. Borl is advising people these days to use ".ib" as
the suffix because of the wickedness of XP.

Report back and we'll advise you further.

Helen