Ann,

A> That's a feature that's present in many databases and one we've
A> discussed at length in the architecture forum. Firebird, as it
A> presently works, isn't really good at handling applications that
A> depend on dynamic table creation. The mental model behind its
A> design is that data is dynamic, but metadata is reasonably stable.

<SNIP>

while I happen to agree with everything you said, the need for "create
table as select" (or "select into") is not necessarily tied to a
design that calls for continuously creating and dropping tables.

Recently I have used the feature in MS SQL for ordinary DBA work, and
found it very useful. I created a lot of tables and dropped none. :-)
Nothing that couldn't be done by good admin/client tools, but having
the feature in SQL is just handy.

A> For one thing, tables have internal identifiers that are not reused
A> and the identifier is only 16 bits. So you get to define a total
A> of 32639 tables, then you run out of identifiers - the first 129
A> identifiers are are reserved for the system tables.

this looks like the next hard-coded limit that should go anyway
(although I'm not sure about the implications).

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
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