I have been evaluating Firebird for a client. They rejected it
because the file size was too large.
It *does* seem rather large. I'm wondering if anybody can tell me
why.

Firebird 1.0.3 on Windows 98 se.

File size Situation
------------- -------------------
~500,000 Database, empty.
~650,000 Database with empty table.
1,758,031,872 Table with 16,947,365 records.

Table definition:

CREATE TABLE T1 (
ID1 VARCHAR(12) NOT NULL,
ID2 VARCHAR(4) NOT NULL,
D1 INTEGER NOT NULL,
D2 INTEGER NOT NULL,
V1 DOUBLE PRECISION,
CONSTRAINT PK_T1
PRIMARY KEY (ID1, ID2, D1, D2) );

Thus, a record is 24 bytes, the fields for the PK comprise 20
bytes, but the database averages some 103 bytes per record (after
dropping the 650,000 bytes of the empty database and table).

This per-record overhead seems significant, and affected my
client's decision. Not that it would matter to them, but I'd like to
understand how Firebird produces this result.

TIA,
-- Stan