Claudio,
Thanks for the tip on the Quicksort vs quick() routine. I will look
into this.

David,
I checked with our internal customer on how his data is typically
inserted into Firebird. His bulk inserts are tables with UNIQUE key
values, but the data is *not* presented in sorted order to Firebird.

I suppose other customers will be different. SAS Data Sets maintain
a "sorted" flag on a per-table basis, which lets the system know if
the data is already in physical sort order. I can see a case where
this could be utilized.

I would think that if the user says that the data is UNIQUE, but
isn't, it would be OK to fail entire load.

I would think that if user says that the data is SORTED, but isn't,
then, system would just perform slower, and maybe log a warning to
firebird log.

In both of these cases, I don't have a strong opinion, though.

-b