Can anyone suggest some patterns or design ideas for centralizing
database access. I have a number of ideas that should work but wanted to
see what you folks would independently come up with.

I could have conceivably thousands of agents that run on machines and
interact with the database, processing rules, executing queries, and
such. Obviously, the firebird server would not be able to handle this
many connections, especially if each agent was optimized to use a
connection pool.

So, I want to create a central server and have that be the only process
that actually uses JDBC connections. What would be the most expedient
way to modify my agents so that they don't use JDBC directly but go to
the server instead? There are a few different options. Modifying my
Persistence Layer to be used as a set of RMI interfaces -- i.e. a
Database RMI Server or to create specific RMI services that encapsulate
the database but provide application level semantics. There's also the
problem of transactions. So I would probably need a Remote (or
Serializable) transaction that encapsulates a connection on the server
side.

TIA for any ideas,

R.