On 9/28/19 8:52 AM, Clyde Eisenbeis cte677@... [firebird-support]
wrote:

>  
> I'll be using Firebird on my personal laptop. My program (that uses
> that database) will be used often
> every day.
>
> I'm puzzled by some of the questions as I have assumed Firebird is a
> dormant database file that my program accesses.  It sounds like
> Firebird is a program that needs to run to work.
>

Firebird is a Database Client/Server application. You program is linked
to the client side, which talks to the server side (and the server side
works the actually database file). This is the way many Database systems
work, and has advantages in that the server side has the ability to
enforce certain sharing and access rules on the database. It does mean
you need to start the 'server' app to access the database.

There are other database systems where the client library directly
accesses the database file(s), SQLite works that way, Microsoft Access
can work that way, the ancient xBase worked that way. These databases
can be converted into a Client/Server system by wrapping them with a
Client/Server wrapper layer, but tend not to provide a lot of access
control, since if the user application is directly accessing the file,
there isn't much the database system can do to 'protect' itself.

--
Richard Damon