> 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?

that's correct. You also cannot connect using the embedded server/client to
a database on a mapped drive (i.e. over the network) it must be on a local
system drive of the PC running the server dll.
The closest thign to your needs would be that your own application provides
a means of other application connecting to it. All other users decalre one
user only as the data source and one application process negotiates the
connections. But all this is so close to installing a firebird server, it's
not worth setting up.
Really - installing a Firebird server is so easy. Just accept the defaults -
it takes anyone with a mouse about 45 seconds and the pain is completely
over.
Alan

>
> 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