Hello Steve,

> Is it safe to insert arbitrarily large number of records in a single
> commit, assuming I don't mind losing them all if I don't commit?

We have an application deployed on hundreds of sites for 3 years and running
against IB 6. Each month, a pump script updates/creates/deletes *millions of
rows* in multiple tables and in a single commit. We never faced a problem
even on old Win95 boxes except, maybe, at the very beginning when Forced
Writes was left OFF.
Regarding speed, I don't remember intermediary commits making such a big
difference if any. But it's a long time that test was issued ...
Note that the pump script has exclusive access to the db.

Regards.

--
Jerome