Is Timothy telling lies?

> "Firebird (based on Borland's InterBase 6.0) and SAP AG's SAP are
> both new entrants in the open-source world, although both have
> established commercial histories.

We are only three or four years old, although many of us used
InterBase previously.

> These are sophisticated products offering complete SQL support,
> transactions, stored procedures and triggers.

That is nice of Timothy to say.

> However, they haven't established open-source developer or user
> communities, and online support resources are limited.

I guess most of us would disagree with this, but words like "limited"
are open to interpretation. And "googling" with the words "Firebird
help" does not return any Firebird references amongst the top 20 hits
:=[ (hence, it may at least be difficult to find the support)

> After releasing InterBase 6.0 code, Borland backed away from its
> open-source plans. The current InterBase, Version 6.5, is not an
> open-source product, so Firebird and InterBase are now diverging
> products.

This is true, although InterBase does seem to include our bug fixes in
their product (probably violating their own license with IB 6.0?).

> All these products are primarily focused on delivering core SQL
> database features and are not competitive with the big commercial
> players in several important areas: online analytical processing,
> data warehousing, data mining, clustering for performance, XML
> storage and query, Enterprise JavaBean support, plug-ins for a wide
> variety of specialty data types, distributed transactions, and
> external data gateways.

"All these products" refer not only to Firebird and SAP, but most
likely to MySQL and PostgreSQL as well (if you read the whole article)
. And I would expect us to not be able to compete with Oracle in these
areas (albeit I do admit knowing very little about many of them, and
not thinking of all of them as important for databases).

> Graphical administration tools are available but simple in scope and
> not competitive with the comprehensive configuration, control,
> monitoring and tuning features found in the large commercial
> offerings.

I'm happy with Firebird Workbench and IB_SQL, but I do not know enough
about the alternatives for Oracle or MS SQL Server to say whether
Martijn can compete.

>Management costs are higher among these database products as a
>result."

This is his one claim that I would claim to be wrong in the case of
Firebird. Aage does not spend much time managing our databases, so our
total management costs are very low. Though for very demanding and
poorly designed databases, I can imagine that even Oracle could be
cheaper. And there was a reason for Arno to fix the optimizer.

Just my thoughts,
Set