ra8009,

> Just a high level short list if IB Objects advantages would be a big
> help. Can I develop my app more quickly? Will I get much better
> performance? What about moving to .NET?

With IBO and Firebird, you will have a great tool to increase your
produtivity and have your job done. You will have a small learning curve to
work with IBO. My advice is to learn the components with time, don't start
to work on something before testing any demo, and see what a change in a
propriety can do for you.

Developing an application to support multi-database is more that just
changing components. The way you are moving in will make you use Firebird or
Oracle as a simple data container, and if you want to keep your application
ready for just changing components, you cannot use stored procedures and
triggers (or you can, but you must rewrite them for both databases).

Your problem is deeper than that. With IBO+Firebird you will have a great
application if you use the beneficts of both: everything you can extract
from Firebird, and everything you can extract from IBO. Looking at Oracle,
perhaps dbExpress will not be the best solution (there are other great
components optimized to access Oracle), and you will have a great
application if you use Oracle tools.

Another option it's to use just IBO TDataset descendants, get some other
good TDataset descendants components for Oracle, and build your server side
for both databases.

I hope this helps!

Artur