Hi again!

> The current Firebird DB (was running an old version of Interbase up
> until a few weeks ago) is completey out of my hand. I have NO idea
> what's going on inside the application itself, and the people who've
> build it are very reluctant to release the information needed to conduct
> the tests you mention.

Sure, that reduces your options.

But there are things that you should still be able to do, you ought to
be able to get the database statistics when Firebird is working heavily
(the difference between oldest active/interesting and next transaction
and index selectivity can at least be useful). And I also think you know
a lot more than what you've told us so far about (approximately) how
many concurrent users are using the program simultaneously and whether
the - for both of us - unknown processes within Firebird should be
demanding or not (e.g. should it select/insert/update/delete one record
or one million records and are there any complex calculations
required?). And counting the number of records within each table in
Firebird and find which indexes are defined is a piece of cake with most
tools (DB Workbench, IB Expert, IB_SQL, FlameRobin (I think, I've never
tried this) to name a few).

This of course doesn't improve your program, but may help discovering
problems with the current implementation or confirming that you really
have demands that are demanding and do require more hardware or a
separate Firebird server.

Set