Well I just (finally) read "Inside SQL Server 7.0) last week and it goes into quite a bit of detail actually.
As I read the details on how things are stored I kept saying to myself that it sounded awfully similar to the much maligned ISAM (at least for the bits I've heard about it over the years). And if you added the .DBC to it there were even more similarities as regards SQLS' storage of DB info in tables too.

I don't see an analogy between (mainframe) ISAM/VSAM. They are quite different as I recollect things. Indexing is different and storage techniques are different between the two.

And I made NO comparison of SQL Server versus Access. I simply commented that I did NOT think that variable length records automatically lead to less efficiency.

Regards,

JimN

>I see no basis for you to make conclusions about MS SQL Server performance from observing MS Access Jet Database performance.
>
>What details of SQL Server's storage mechanism do we know?
>
>>>Assuming you mean B-tree, Fox indexes are B-trees (actually B+trees?)
>>>
>>>The perfomance difference comes from the variable record length of the Access files.
>>>
>>>Incidentally, Btrieve files are ISAM.
>>
>>So it *still* looks to me that there are only marginal differences between SQL Server's storage mechanism and ISAM in general.
>>
>>And I would question to a minor degree that variable length records slow Access (or SQL Server, for that matter) down. Given the speed of today's CPUs versus HD, I can estimate a distinct advantage for variable length records, *especially* when the average content length for any field is well below the maximum length of a field.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>JimN