@hamogu - in FITS and votable, astropy adheres to the strongest FITS and VOTable standards, not subsets of these standards (say e.g. a Chandra events list). So we should adhere to the strictest IPAC table format, but DBMS is not strict IPAC, it's only a subset of the features, which to me is different. To me, strict IPAC means e.g. no comments longer than 78 characters. So setting dbms=False by default is still consistent with what we are doing elsewhere in Astropy.