All--

I'm currently in the position of making architectural recommendations at
work. The firm I've joined is an equity options market maker. Our team's
primary development arena is real-time trading systems running on
Windows. New applications are written in C++, C# and VB.net with
additional legacy base in VB6.

Because most of the nature of the options market, many of the
applications exist without persistent state. Every time they're run,
it's like the first time.

OTOH, there are places where persistent state would be incredibly
helpful, but solutions have been architected around the need for state
information because that's the shape of other solutions.

So, I'm advocating we install a DBMS and start persisting a lot of our
core information. It will make a lot of existing applications more
useful, more stable, and more accurate. By my best estimates, our data
needs aren't terribly rigorous. By the end of 2005, we'll be doing about
70,000 database writes and 12,000 reads a day if current development
continues apace.

That being said, I'm ready to advocate that we use Firebird as our DBMS
with the other two most likely options being Sybase on Linux or SQL
Server on Win2k. But, so far, this is based entirely on external
observation and research. I haven't used Interbase in about ten years.
My DBMS experience since then is with SQL Server, Sybase, and Oracle. I
am most proficient in SQL Server.

My second option, after Firebird, is SQL Server. If I'm going to sell
Firebird to the team, I need to compare the two products. Firebird
already has the upper hand on price point, but it's going to take more
than that.

So, I have a couple of questions:

If you were presenting Firefox as an alternative to SQL Server, what
would your selling points be? We've already talked the benefits of open
source vs. commercial products to death without a conclusion, so that's
not going to sell it.

What features of SQL Server am I going to miss if we use Firebird? Is
there support for complex data types? Extended stored procedures? Native
XML support?

Any guidance y'all could provide would be deeply appreciated.

--Jekke