Porting an IBXpress Interbase 6 app to the current Firebird platform, on Delphi 7?

Question

Just wondering if there are any gotchas to be wary of here. We have a legacy D7 app that we developed several years ago for a client, which uses IBXpress to talk to the open source Interbase 6 build.

We're having a number of issues with that platform these days (very slow to connect/start-up on new hardware being the chief one) and the client has okayed spending some time/money moving the database over to Firebird.

We really DON'T want to embark upon moving it to D2010 (or D2007 which would be my preference right now) as we figure that we might have to move the database layer from IBXpress to something else to best suit Firebird anyway. And at the end of the day, the client is only looking to lessen the database pain, not overhaul/upgrade/rewrite the app.

Given the ancestry of Firebird, is it a fairly painless, well-understood path from IBXpress Interbase 6 to (whatever) with Firebird? We have quite a number of sprocs, triggers (and even datatypes) etc in the existing IB database already (and the client has a number of paying customers all using this platform) so we felt that going to Firebird was more likely to be a smoother move than moving to SQL Express (or another flavour of DB entirely).

Note that we're not looking for 'embedded' DB advocacy - in many of our client's customers' installations, the software is used in a multi-user client-server way so keeping that kind of approach is important.

Answer 1

IBExpress still work with Firebird 2.1 if you don't use unicode charset.

You can also switch to - FIBPlus - IBDac - IBObjects

or JVUIB but it will be more hard if you use many dataset

Answer 2

Besides database access components you will also need in some tool for easy migration of your existing IB 6.0 databases to Firebird 2.5. I could recommend FDBConvert utility, which saves a great deal of time. Download link:

http://gsbelarus.com/gs/fdbconvert/fdbconvert_eng.html