I must admit I also would prefer not to see InterBase start bolting into the
engine bells & whistles.
One of the great beauties of FB/IB is it has such a small footprint.

If this feature were justifiable then there are hundreds of others on the
same basis.

What I would prefer to see is someone make a little utility which is
external to the engine that people, according to their own options and
requirements, would use to manage such things. It would maintain some of its
own system tables to work with, but it wouldn't be at the engine/core level.
Perhaps some generic hooks could be put into the engine to facilitate these
types of external "helper" systems.

In short, I consider all that you have asked for here to be a generation
above what should be happening IN a database engine. This should be
something outside of the engine doing all of this.

Sorry to labor the point so wordily.

Jason Wharton
CPS - Mesa AZ
http://www.ibobjects.com