Hi all,


I have volunteered to write a statistics-type program in
Lazarus/FreePascal under Linux and I need an embedded database, that
means it has to be Firebird. I've used a lot of database software
before, but never Firebird (nor Interbase, for that matter). I do NOT
want to force users to install a full-blown database server in order
to use the software.


My problem is that I must avoid duplicated records in the database,
the unique key is a complicated structure containing four 16-bit words
plus a 108-bit set of flags. The combination of the whole lot must be
unique. I don't need to retrieve this data other than to check for
duplicate records, so I can massage it in FreePascal so that it can go
into the database in any form that's desirable.


If I were using PostgreSQL, I'd store the whole lot as a single
172-bit bitstring, but I can't find any mention of an equivalent data
type in the Firebird documentation that I've been able to find.


So, how would you store this data for greatest speed/efficiency in
checking for duplicates, please? I'm looking at a few million records
in the database, and there's a record size of around 350-400 bytes.




Thanks,


Brian.