"Jim Starkey" <jas@...> wrote:

>
> Uh, Sean, it's been that way since the GDS/Galaxy alpha in 1985. If you
> check the history, you will find that Rdb/ELN (immediate precursor to
> GDS/Galaxy, Interbase, and Firebird) was the first database to allow
> unrestricted metadata updates which the database was running
> multi-user. Before then, all database systems, Oracle, I believe,
> included, did an in-place conversion requiring exclusive access to the
> object in question.

What you describe here is completely unrelated story. You'd better ask what
"metadata invalidation" means in Oracle. There never was such a thing in
InterBase.

> So it isn't a question of Firebird picking up a
> useful Oracle feature but Oracle copying a useful Firebird feature.

InterBase was almost frozen for many years while other databases evolved.
Why do you tend to ignore this fact?

> And, as I said before, there is no need to mark anything as invalid.

There are enough cases when invalidation is a handy solution to deal with
complex metadata changes.


Dmitry