Rita Liotta wrote: > I don't know what happened, but this isn't my question.
What happened is that you replied to a thread that was on a different subject - it is called "hijacking". You should have started a new topic. > What I asked was > if there was any way I can access and sort the attached file without > having Firebird installed. There is no "attached file". This list does not accept attachments. > I am not a Firebird user. I simply have an > ...fdb file that I would like to alphabetize. Your Firebird file contains a relational database built with the Firebird engine. A database is not a list of things that could be "alphabetized". It is very different from a spreadsheet, being entirely abstract, not human-readable, and managed by the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) which, in this case, is Firebird. Data are extracted from this abstract system using a formal query language called SQL. One uses SQL queries to define the properties of sets of data for extraction as sets of rows made up of one or more columns (a.k.a. fields). "Alphabetization" of an output set, for example, can be requested using an ORDER BY clause on an alphanumeric column (field) in an underlying table. > I don't have Firebird, just > the file. The fdb is from an entirely different app. If one understands the structure of a relational database and knows Firebird's SQL language, one can use a tool to connect to a database and query one or more tables in various ways -- but not, however, without the client application or tool connecting to the database through the Firebird engine. There are various client tools out there through which you can run queries and do stuff with the output; some will even enable you to compose a query interactively. See https://firebirdsql.org/en/third-party-tools/. Some tools can even cross the boundaries of different database engines, making it possible, e.g., to read a Firebird database from a MSAccess client, through an ODBC driver layer. Ultimately, though, some sort of driver connects to the Firebird API and the Firebird API manages the connection of the database to the Firebird engine. There is no workaround to avoid having the Firebird engine in some form at the back end. Helen --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com