>Guys, this product was started by heretics who called themselves
>"renegade systems". You would have hated everything we stood for
>(and still stand for). You came into a project after ideas ossified
>and orthodoxy rules. Fundamentalism is inherently reactionary, but
>if you guys could go back to the beginning of Interbase you would
>run screaming back into your time machines, set the throttle back to
>VISAM or IMS, and hit the button.

OK, here is something renegade and fundamentalist: how about having
'MimeType' and 'ApplyCompression' attributes for each blob?

This way, both the server and and the clients know what they need
top do with it.

Here is a list of 'MimeType's, only a subset needs to be
supported.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/

And, if the user sets 'ApplyCompression' to false for any field, it
means the user does not want the server to compress it at all
--useful for full text search etc.

Alternatively, my personal favorite, instead of ApplyCompression
we might have 'CompressionType' attribute where the user assigns
his/her own choice for the kind of compression --'none' being that the
server should apply no compression at all.

This way, we will have an extensible compression mechanism that
can handle new compression techniques, including hardware ones.

>>It is my belief that Firebird needs to be "scalable" and also
>>to have a possibly "small footprint". As such it is important
>>that it runs on relatively low-resource machines (in todays
>>terms, not in the terms of 20 years ago). It must be able to
>>scale down as well as up!
>>
>What's the worst machine you can imagine running Firebird?

http://www.viavpsd.com/product/epia_m_spec.jsp?motherboardId=81

Processor: VIA Processor, 600 MHz (Fanless) or 1GHz with Fan
RAM: Up to 1GB memory size
Ethernet: 1 or 2 100BaseT

Cheers,
Adem