> If you take proper care of your transactions and have forced writes set (default with Firebird), restarts should not be that much of an issue (well, if you have 100 employees connected and a server going down 10 times a day, they will get irritated). Sure, you lose what has not been committed and those that were connected at the time the server went down will have to reconnect and they will also lose what has not been committed, but the Firebird server could start as a service and corruptions would not normally occur.

From everything I've read, you are 100% correct about Firebird. I was really talking about the impact on others in the office when a user must restart (especially if they do it without notice). You are also right about the increased impact on larger offices. That is one of my many motivations for switching from Access to Firebird. Access is pretty easy to corrupt when the server computer goes down right in the middle of editing a record. I understand that is much less of a problem with Firebird.