Claudio,

> - It seems that Borland's revenues come exclusively from selling their
> closed version following the old good commercial model and IBPhoenix'
> revenues come from optimizing applications and repairing databases.
> Is this model profitable so that those companies won't drop the
> product? BTW, by reading the forums we came to the conclusion that IB
> databases become corrupt often and it's not uncommon that they cannot
> be restored, too.

You give the impression that database are prone to corruption, which I
know was not your intent.

To clarify for all, there are a number of ways that databases can be
corrupted, due to internal/engine factors and external factors (most
common).

The internal factors are:

- Using ambiguous connection string to access a database on a Windows
server -- this has been fixed in Firebird v1.0

- Having a single database file grow larger than 2/4GB -- this has also
been fixed in Firebird v1.0

- Engine bugs -- thanks in no small part to Claudio, a LOT of these bugs
have been found/killed/squassed. There are no known fatal bugs in the
FB 1.0 release.


The external factors include:

- Using FORCED WRITES = OFF, regardless of OS platform. A sudden
shutdown of the server will result in a database corruption (on Windows
100% of the time).

- Bad hardware.


Sean