Woody,

>
> How else can you get a total # of orders processed within a given date range
> for a certain type of material and a particular customer? I do reports all
> the time where only the totals are shown, not the details.
>

The real crime against Firebird is not a well qualified count - we
tend to be not much slower than other databases when there are
indexed terms and about the same when there are a combination of
indexed and non-indexed terms in the where clause for a count.

The place where we don't do so well is counting a whole table
when there's primary key. Non-MVCC databases can just count
the number of index entries. Lots of people think that the
cleverest way to create an artificial primary key is

select count(*) + 1 from table

By the way, PostgreSQL has exactly the same performance
characteristics.

Cheers,

Ann