I've not personally had any problems with FK's "out of the box" -- we have a fair number of lookup
tables (approx. 115), both big and small, and poor performance has usually been our fault at the
query level. (There was one case of a self-join in a large table where the optimizer got terribly
confused, but the use of views helped that.) You can disable the index on foreign key fields if you
feel the index is hurting more than it's helping, or you can trick the optimizer at run-time into
ignoring a particular index using nonsensical OR statements (which I personally feel shouldn't
work, but that's another issue entirely.) If you're having problems with inserts, it sounds more
like you have some index somewhere that is not defined, and the lookup is taking forever each time
you insert. Particularly if you're doing your FK's by hand, you should make sure you have the
proper indexing set up. There's only so much tweaking firebird can do for you.

If you're considering MS Access as a possible solution because of speed, then you likely don't need
most of firebird's features. Use what's best for you, don't feel pressured into using one system or
another for any reasons but your own.

-Philip

---------- Original Message -----------
From: German Pablo Gentile <listas.ggentile@...>

> The complain was about why any user defining integrity checks
> and having a few a foreign values (and see how relative is the *few*
> here) must do a lot of additional work before can use foreign keys!
> Foreign keys tables having little (?) amount of data in Firebird are
> unusables for the b-tree index strucuture. The inserts in the main table
> are sloowly in a poor way.
>
> German.

------- End of Original Message -------