> Having a "const midas::odb" probably does not work (at least I would not know how to implement that).
> 
> But I could make an internal flag analog to the auto refresh flags. So you would have
> 
>     o.set_write_protect(true);
> 
> to turn on write protection. Would that work for you?

Absolutely. Looking at the underlying code I was also at a loss how const would work.
I'm mostly just interested in having small clients that only read from the odb (for whatever reason) without risking corrupting it by messing something 
up in the code, especially since such small clients are almost by definition hacked together quickly on the fly.