VB Programming with Firebird

Your developing an application that requires a database, which one will you use? If the application is only being accessed by no more then 4-5 people at any given time, then Access can be a good choice. But what if this application will be accessed by 20-50 people or more at any given time and needs to be a server then what?
Well you can use MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase or InterBase among others. But what if you or your customer is on a tight budget then what? What if you needed a powerful database server but you don't have the big bucks to fork over on the major databases!
Well your in luck, because there are open source databases out there other then MySQL. While MySQL is a very good database lets face it, you cant do Stored Procedures, although these features may be available in a year, but you need them now.
This month we will be looking Firebird. Firebird will blow Access out of the water and can compete with MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase and InterBase. As a matter of fact firebird is InterBase, on July 25th, 2000 Borland decided to make InterBase open source, to the horror of Microsoft. Later they decided to keep up a commercial versions, so the open source version of InterBase became Firebird and the commercial version is stilled called InterBase.
While I wanted to provide in depth examples on both Firebird and SAP DB (another open source database), I could only do this on Firebird. While I was able to install SAP DB on my NT machine, the only thing I was able to do is test if the database was running and start and stop the database. I installed the web tools but for some reason they did not get installed properly because I was not able to access them. Now it could be that my NT system was not up to specs, so if you are able to run SAP DB on your machine successfully please let us know. By the way SAP DB only works on NT/2000 and XP. So I will be going in depth on working with Firebird but I will only be able to provide you with links and information on SAP DB. It's to bad really I was really looking forward to testing SAP DB.
Oh, by the way did I tell you that Firebird is FREE! When I say free I mean free both for personal and commercial use.
Lets talk about Firebird!

http://home.pacbell.net/cetta/VB-Firebird-SAP.html