At 4/6/00 04:56 PM (Thursday), Jim Starkey wrote:

Hey, I'm the last person to argue that design of Interbase has been
properly appreciated.  Ann thinks it's neat, though.

What I meant was that IB marketing or R&D didn't fully appreciate how valuable using the descriptors would be or we would have it now.

I would very much like to see the current UDF mechanism phased out
in favor of Java.  The sandbox model is attractive, but the (theoretical)
ability to install or replace UDFs while the server is running would
be absolutely wonderful.  There are JVMs that handle dynamic class
replacement, but no open source ones.  The main problem is efficiency
switching between C and Java without undue overhead.  There are
also thread and garbage collection issues, but given a suitably
tame JVM...

I'm with you on this one, big time! Combining Java with the database server yields lots of possibilities.

Concerning dynamic class replacement: This was anticipated by the Java fathers and I think it can easily be done in any VDM using custom class loaders. This is what servlet engines do when servlets are updated. If a servlet is replaced while the server is running, the next time it is instantiated the loader looks at the file timestamp which stores the class and compares it to the timestamp of when the class was last loaded. If it is newer a new copy of the class is loaded. Batta bing, batta boom.