<<Let us assume that manual masters are the problem. One way to avoid
this situation is not to use them. You trade greater concurrency for
automatic integrity checking of "foreign" keys. You could always turn
your manual masters into detail sets, with an automatic master for the
key, then program in logical lookups against the "master" detail set
instead of depending upon Image to detect a missing key.>>
 
This is a good point; we ended up doing just this conversion a few years
ago. The previous design had dozens of manual master sets, and most of
these were also related to detail sets keyed on the manual master's key
item. The concurrency problems became unsupportable, so we converted
almost all of the manual master sets to an auto-master-plus-detail
configuration. Our remaining manual master sets are, with one exception,
stand-alone "mini-databases", with no other sets having search items
keyed on the master set key.
 
Steve Dirickson         WestWin Consulting
(360) 598-6111  [log in to unmask]