I'm looking for a new light weight database to deploy with some
desktop software. My biggest concern is support for multiple
simultaneous connections to the database while keeping the database
installation and administration out of the user's way. I'm using
SQLite right now and many users are putting their database files on
network mapped drives. It works great for single user access but as
soon as more than one person attaches to that database the performance
slows to unusable.

Ideally I'd like every installation of the software to maintain a
server that other workstations could connect to so any install could
be the server (seems like that would be less headache for users). I'm
reading about FireBird's embedded server and it sounds like what I'm
looking for except for one (very large) thing.

"But you should be aware that you cannot access single database from a
number of the embedded servers simultaneously, because they have
SuperServer architecture and hence exclusively lock attached databases."

Just to make sure I understand that properly that means it's *not*
going to do what I want, and allow other machines to connect remotely
to the database. Right?

The "real" server version of FireBird looks great but I hope to keep
installs of my software to a single installer and do all the database
installation and configuration automatically. I think I'd be asking
for trouble if I required users to install FireBird separately.

Thanks to all for any information!

--
- Mitchell