On Fri, 06 Mar 2015 08:58:36 -0500, you wrote:

Thanks folks, particularly to Ann - that bit about the way Firebird
arranges the indexes itself was the clincher. It seems difficult to
find a full manual for Firebird unless I speak Russian (I don't!), all
there seems to be on the main site are updates - unless this is meant
to mean the full manual updated to version 2.5, in which case it's a
strange (and misleading) way to put it.

Brian.


>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.
>
>
>------------------------------------
>Posted by: brian <brian@...>
>------------------------------------
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