I was curious about BLR so I had a quick look but there isn’t much around other than what’s on Firebird’s website. Their description of BLR makes it sound like

I was curious about BLR so I had a quick look but there isn’t much around other than what’s on Firebird’s website. Their description of BLR makes it sound like an eagerly-evaluated equivalent of SQL Server’s Execution Plans, but are compiled on CREATE instead of on first-use, and are comprised of machine-native (i.e. raw x86/x64 + disk read syscalls) operators arranged together - or maybe slightly higher-level? It’s unclear how schema-binding works. I’m curious what advantages there are to that approach anymore: databases are invariably IO-bound, not CPU bound, and things like well-maintained indexes and statistics objects are far more important when it comes to DB perf than the ISA of the query engine. I’d wager an ultramodern engine running in WASM or even interpreted Java will run faster on the same hardware than JET, I’d think. On a related note, why are we still stuck with 4K/8K-sized pages?