>> Silly thought basically since my databases are now moving from sub 100Mb to
>> the 100 to 500Mb range.
>> Is there a means of asking for a single 500Mb of space when restoring a
>> database? So that we have expansion space already allocated.
>>
> Not so silly - we've been looking at the advantages of preallocating
> space for Jim's project at MySQL. For the moment, we're not doing it,
> but it's still on the list of potential performance boosts. There's

Firebird have preallocation feature implemented since v 2.1 :

http://firebird.cvs.sourceforge.net/firebird/firebird2/doc/README.DiskSpaceAllocation?view=markup

> no way to tell gbak about a minimum allocation. One could add a
> parameter dpb used on the create call to specify a minimum size and
> the server could be taught to create empty space. It's non-trivial,
> but not very hard either.

Of course. I plan to add this ability in some of the next Firebird releases

> The question is whether it would be useful.

I believe - yes.

Regards,
Vlad