Zsolt Balanyi wrote:

>
> ... if there are any plans to move Firebird in the
> direction of distributed database management systems?
>

The first versions of InterBase - Firebird's ancestor -
did allow access to many databases simultaneously, both
local and remote. It includes a two phase commit so
changes to several databases can be coordinated. However,
as someone noted, there is no provision in SQL for
distributed database access, so the capability went
dormant when SQL became the access language.

There is another major caveat: databases were accessed
in separate requests, so a join would be emulated with
something like nested FOR SELECT loops, and a UNION by
serial FOR SELECT loops on each table.

At the time, we considered implementing joins across
databases, but the optimization challenges were hard -
so it never happened. However we could, for a while,
create a statement that combined data from Oracle,
Rdb, and InterBase databases.

Cheers,

Ann