Lotus Notes is an extraordinarily powerful and useful system - but its
database model is not relational, more like the pre-relational,
hierarchical database. What a Notes database and a relational
database are best-suited for is quite different. Notes 'tables' (i.e.
documents) are in themselves unstructured and flexible, unlike RDBMS
tables (and fixed structures are not always the best thing).

In Notes you need to use multiple databases because the view indexes
become relatively inefficient as they become moderately large. It is
unlikely you will need to worry about partitioning data that you store
in Firebird until you are orders of magnitude past the scale of what
you would consider feasible in Lotus Notes (having said that, the
Notes developer forums have dbs that were 16GB in size, IIRC).

Notes is no toy - it is a persistent datastore that is founded upon
replication (rather than bolting replication on as an afterthought).
And Notes security reaches down to field level (as does replication).
And unlike Firebird, Notes is also an application development
environment, with multiple language interfaces.

For me, Lotus Notes and Firebird are two of my essential technologies.

Regards, Bernard

> >more in a generelle sense...like when is a
> >certain amount af tables considered "too many" design wise?
> >
> >I plan to use Firebird a lot in the future, so would really like to

do it

> >"the right way"
> >
> >I come from a Lotus Notes/Domino world where it is normal to split

data

> >into different databases
> >
> >Not being able to do cross database joins, I guess forces one to use a
> >single database pr. application ?