Lester,

L> Am I the only person who is getting irritated by the criticism that
L> Firebird is not very good as a single user built in database engine?

Not sure what you are talking about... Is there some thread in some
list that I missed? BTW IMHO Firebird (in its embedded form fbembed)
is *very good* as a single user built in database engine.

L> Most of the people who have been asking for an embedded
L> version will never use that file other than in the single user application.

Not sure about that either. They have an easier-than-ever upgrade path
(provided they didn't design their applications and schemas with ISAM
in mind) and many of them will probably follow it.

L> Do we need to spend time trying to full fill everybodies requirements

Absolutely. Every requirement that makes sense, of course. Firebird is
essentially an engine, on top of which a server is built. It's not
*inherently* a client/server database and that's why it works so well
(even) in single user mode.

L> complaints will be that it could be speeded up if some of the facilities
L> only used by multi user systems are removed.

This has already been done: fbembed doesn't have a server around it
(it only acts as an engine). Probably it wasn't made for performance
reasons, but I don't see anything wrong in having the software
able to adapt to the particular task at hand. Only when two
features conflict should you take the decision of supporting one and
deprecating the other. So far Firebird works very well both as an
enterprise database and as an embedded single-user database. I don't
see any reason to ditch one of these use cases *in advance*. If some
day someone will request a feature that is only good for single user
mode, *and* that feature doesn't hurt Firebird when run in a different
scenario, *and* it's consistent with the architecture and the
development goals, then why not implement it?

L> Is this something that needs outlining on the 'roadmap' and people
L> pointed somewhere else when their requirements simply do not need
L> anything more than a flat file engine :)

I don't think we'll get any good by pointing anyone anywhere else than
here. :-)

L> I find that where I use Firebird on a single machine, it's nice to be
L> able to log in and fix things remotely

I think so too, that's why I asked for an embeddable *server* (as
opposed to the current fbembed, which is just an embeddable *engine*).
Unfortunately noone is willing to implement it, as it appears, at
least until Vulcan is finished.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
mailto:nandod@...