Friday, November 25, 2005

Connect to Firebird embedded, two faces of the same coin

I'm doing some experiments with Firebird 2.0 beta 1 embedded and I found out some "interesting "features:

1. You can connect to an embedded Firebird database through ODBC
1.1 This connection works even if you are connecting to a read-only database file places on a "web folder" (a webdav share mounted in windows)
1.2 For this to work you need to copy fbembed.dll to c:\windows\system32 and rename it to GDS32.DLL

2. You can also connect to an embedded Firebird database through JDBC
2.1 For this to work you need to:
2.1.1 Place JDBC driver (jaybird-full-2.0.0.jar in my case) in your classpath
2.1.2 Place jaybird2.dll somewhere in java.library.path (which usually contains c:\windows\system32)
2.1.3 Do the same for fbembed.dll and the standard (client) GDS32.DLL

3. This makes clear that ODBC and JDBC connections to firebird embedded don't get together easily ... even if the solution is clear.

4. There are some small incompatibilities between Firebird 2 beta 1 and Jaybird 2.0.0

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