As a developer working on multiple customers databases, you know the issue: What client version to use with the database? Wouldn't be nice you could just open the .fdb file or connect to the SQL database, without worrying about by accident converting the database.
With NAV Launcher, which builds on the original "Navision Starter" by Sergey Gazizyanow, you can do this. It is shell integrated, so you just have to double click on the .fdb file, or select the SQL database - the program will then open the client version that corresponds to the database version.
How is this done? In SQL you can find the database version in dbo.[ndo$dbproperty].databaseversionno. In a local native database you can find this in the actual fdb file at position 0x2004, here is a list of the possible values:
| Client version | SQL / databaseversionno | FDB, native 0x2004 |
| 3.70 | 17 | 0x10 |
| 4.0 | 30 | 0x11 |
| 4.0 SP2 | 40 | 0x11 |
| 4.0 SP3 | 60 | 0x12 |
| 5.0 | 80 | 0x13 |
| 5.0 SP1 | 95 | 0x13 |
As you can see some releases did no changes for the native version, and the latest servicepack for 5.0, is a SQL db-version upgrade only. I assume there are other issues fixed in the client, so it should still be worth upgrading - guess it will work with the same server version when they have same db-version.