> and that brought the time down to 39-42 seconds. Big
> improvement.

Thats about 333 inserts/second. The more than a thousand/second that
I have seen were on a local IB installation (700MHz with UW SCSI) - I
did not think that a 100Mbs network would have that big an impact on
such small inserts but it must be so. Unless...

> Server : Dual-Proc PPRO 200MHZ

If this is running WinNT/W2K: Are you aware of the problems that IB
has with multiple processor systems in WinNT environments? It can
actually become slower as a result! You can help resolve the problem
by using IB_Affinity, see...
http://www.ait-augsburg.de/downloads.htm

> Don't quite understand why you emphasize
> creating a column reference,

In your simple instance it probably would not matter, since you could
reliably know that Params.Columns[0] refers to the one and only
parameter. In more complex situations it can be helpful to create a
reference in advance so that you can use...
ParamByName('MYPARAM')
to retrieve the parameter reference OUTSIDE the loop. Since retrieval
by name is much more complex that a direct array lookup, it can save
significant processing by not performing the ByName lookups inside the
loop.

Even so, a direct reference to the param column object should still a
few CPU cycles faster than even the column array lookup.

> I thought the only threading implication with using IB
> was the 1 processor limit.
>
> Any chance this will be changed(fixed?) in your firebird
> version?

The last a read about it, Borland did not even think it was a bug. I
imagine that if it will be fixed it will be from Firebird. However I
would not be holding my breath (or delaying projects) waiting for it.


Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing