[firnsy]

I also understand that an hybrid db solution(sqlite+MySQL) could be a lot of work to implement in the code, but have you consider my suggestion of storing "local-only" media info in a local SQLite db, and network shared media info in the central MySQL db?

This technically also requires some form of hybrid solution.

The main issue I see with this is that for a client with both local and remote media db connections how do you reliably join the two resulting data sets. We try to utilise the db backend to it's full extent with sorting and filtering. By having to combine two result sets (one from the local db and one from the remote db) we have to add this filtering/sorting capability in the xbmc core which adds a lot of overhead (and duplicity of function).

I'm guessing the use case here is that if you have local media and the network media/db is down then you can still watch your local content only.

If so, then this is currently in the "too complex basket". The primary use case for the central DB, as I see it, is where you have central repository of information (db and media) and multiple clients (essentially dumb) that use their local storage only for caching.