Hi Marco,

> "Database Systems" is the major annual conference in the Netherlands
> about DBMS trends and technologies. It is visited mainly by IT-staff of
> major corporations in the country. I never visited the conference
> myself, if only for the fee.

URL?

> Next year's conference (March 2004) will have a presentation on Open
> Source DBMS's as a viable alternative for the well-known commercial
> systems. The conference organization has requested me to speak on this
> subject, as a follow-up to the article on Firebird that I wrote for a
> Dutch-language magazine some months ago.

Very interesting - a good opportunity for Firebird to get some feet between
some doors.

> Obviously, I will propose Firebird as "industry strength" technology fit
> for most business applications. However, my knowledge about other Open
> Source DBMS technologies (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SapDb and what have you) is
> still rather limited. They expect me to say something about those as well.

SapDB has been bought by MySQL and will continue as something called
MySQL MaxDB: http://www.sapdb.org/7.4/sapdb_mysql.htm

> So here are some questions for those of you who have hands-on experience
> with other open source DBMS systems:

I can answer a couple of questions for you, with regard to MySQL.

> * How do they compare with Firebird in terms of:
> - reliability (tx-support);

MySQL supports different table types via "table handlers". From what I
understand,
you can plugin some code and create a table handler.

Transaction support is available for the InnoDB and BerkeleyDB table types.

InnoDB also supports Foreign Key constraints.

None of the MySQL tables support CHECK constraints.

> - ease of administration;

I believe both MySQL and PostgreSQL are "install and forget" except for
backups.

> - performance and scalability;

MySQL is supposed to be very fast on SELECTs, but - currently - does not
yet support things like sub-selects (except for a beta version).

> - SQL compliance;

See above.

> - developer support (triggers/procs/events/constraints/assertions..)

Multi-byte character sets are to be supported in MySQL 4.1, something which
Firebird and InterBase have been supporting for years.

The current version of MySQL doesn't support triggers or stored procedures.
Version 5 is supposed to support these. Views are to be supported in v5.1...

MySQL does support native full-text indexing, a feature that's lacking in
Firebird,
it also supports native SSL for network communication.

Events are, as far as I know, an InterBase/Firebird only thing.

Mind you, MySQL is NOT free if you will be using it for commercial projects.


With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - developer tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL & MS SQL
Server.
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com