Ann W. Harrison wrote:

> The single file architecture is deliberate and reflects some
> behaviors of Firebird and attitudes of its designers.
>
> First, it simplifies system management
> Second, early on, the designers decided that striping and similar
> schemes to reduce disk contention belonged with the disk system not
> the database.
> Third, a major reason for placement control is to avoid moving
> back and forth between the index and the data on indexed queries.

I would add another benefit of single-file database: it allows you to
have a database with thousands of tables without having preformance
problems. Many filesystems get really slow when they have more than
10000 files in a directory. If you use MySQL's MyISAM engine for
example, it would create 3 files for each database table which could
pose a problem.

--
Milan Babuskov

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==================================