--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Doug Chamberlin

> Think of the DB as a pure data store. Only enough smarts to keep up
> the data integrity and coordinate access from multiple agents.

Very true.

> The app server is where the business intelligence is located.
> Knowing what relates to what and in what way. (The data store
> needs to mirror some of this, of course.) Most access to the data
> is done through the app server but there could be more than one for
> performance reasons.

This does not necessarily need to be a "server". Think of it as a
design guideline. We have very good success with the clean separation
of dataaccess logic, the object (or business) model, the actual
busines logic and the front end.
It doesn't matter whether we talk about web applications (either J2EE
or .net) a client server application or a distributed application
(using an app server such as an EJB container)

The data access layer knows how to retrieve and store objects passed
from the object model in the database. The business logic knows how to
combine the different "business objects" to achieve its logic. In most
cases that I have dealt with the separation is more a logical then a
physicaly one, as those parts of the code usually run inside the same
machine.

Cheers
Thomas