> For fast serial access to IMAGE data, buy Suprtool from Robelle
> (www.robelle.com). They've already done the work,

Yup....  So has AICS Research, with QueryCalc.  I believe both
Robelle and AICS Research use essentially the same MR NOBUF
technique to significantly speed up READ-ONLY serial access...
and both companies have been doing it long enough that this
particular technology from either of them is solid and reliable...

> The IMAGE intrinsics for manipulating IMAGE data are as fast as
> they can be and still be safe. If you want to bypass those intrinsics
> and write your own, then you run the very real risk of breaking your
> database.  ....... Plus you've wasted how many man-months
> duplicating what you already had......?

I quite frankly cannot conceive of a real-world production situation
where any site, and I do mean *any* site, could make a plausible
technical and financial case for "roll-your-own" WRITE access to
IMAGE ("just-for-the-fun-of-it" crash-and-burn machines with throw-
away databases excepted).  Mike Hornsby already posted perhaps
the best concise list of things to do first, that I would expect would
be one or more orders-of-magnitude quicker, cheaper, and more
reliable in most if not all cases....

I will also add to what Mike said about AUTODEFER:

>  ( note I don't like to enable for AUTODEFER but rather like to call
> DBcontrol Mode 1)

If you decide to enable AUTODEFER, unless you absolutely don't care
about your data make sure you are also doing user logging... which
of course also uses some resources....

.... FWIW, our site is paranoid enough that we *never* enable
AUTODEFER....  but we still always log to disc (to a different volume
set from where the production database is located, where we also
keep last night's backup copy of the production databases on disc)...
and, yes:  I realize not everyone has the luxury of that much extra
disc space...  in any case, with the number of users we have and
896 MB in our 959KS/200, disc I/O is almost never a bottleneck for
us, for what most end-users do most of the time....

Ken Sletten