Ann,

Thanks for answering.

> >First let's note that I restarted the test after a few 100K rows

and

> >emptied the table.
> >
> >Adding 10,000 records took 34 seconds at first.
> >
> >After emptying the table it took 50 seconds. I read some place

that

> >it was more efficient for FireBird to reuse allocated disk space

than

> >allocate new space. I cannot confirm it with my setup.

> On question is how you emptied the table. If you're running
> single user, the procedure is first to delete all the rows,
> then commit, then count the rows, then commit then begin
> inserting again. If you're running multi-user, you must wait
> until all concurrent transactions have committed before
> counting the records to force garbage collection.

Single user. I used either IB Access or IB Expert to do the deleting.

> What happens if you commit (not commit retaining, but actually
> commit) every 10,000 records?

I tried issue a commit every 10000 inserts, unfortunately I am
getting an error message when doing so through embedded SQL (from
Clarion).

When I get back to testing FireBird, I'll let you know what it says.

Regards,

Terry