Hi SET,

Thanks for the detailed explanation on when NULL is not NULL or maybe it is NULL, or...

I have used mailing lists before and found them pretty useless in the scheme of things. You have to search through digests of mixed old and new postings. Also as I said, it is a post and wait thing.

A great example of not using a list was my experience ov the past two or three days on this group. I was able to post multipl questions and get dozens of replies.

With the speed of that my learning curve was drastically shortened and I am now able to build a database with some confidence that a lot of professional touches have been included.

With a mailing list I would still be waiting. I therefore refuse to join mailing lists to perpetuate the slowness and uselessness. {grin}

I fail to see why Firebird can't have a yahoo group similar to this one. However after struggling with some useless error messages I am fast getting the impression that the Firebird family et al, like to cling to the seeming "magic" of programming. It harks back to the old days when programmers liked to pretend they were a race/breed apart from the normal Man. They "understood" magic.

Yesterday afternoon when converting my DBF files to FDB, I struggled with an error message along the lines of,
"Numerical arithmetic, unknown value or truncated string error"

With such a broad span of options it made finding the problem very tedious and time consuming. No record number, no indicated field or data, no indication of where or what caused the error. I wasted an hour trying to figure it out from the Firebird end to no avail.

I went back the DBF program and scanned every field of every record (several thousand) very carefully. It turned out to be ONE integer field in the entire DBF file that was empty (TDBF can be like that {grin}) instead of containing a zero or a numeric value. I changed that one field to a zero and for a total of two hours wasted time, the error message went away.

With such esoterica (as perceived by me) and useless error messages (fact), Firebird is not for me. I will try some other SQL systems as I don't believe it has to be this difficult. I see MySQL and PostgreSQL in way more commercial use and maybe that's why. They may be more programmer friendly.

I very much appreciate the help I have received here. I am especially grateful to Jason for IBObjects.

Dave