Adam wrote:

> Firstly, thanks to Jakub for the translation.

Yep

> Secondly, the results are obviously not real world results. If so,
> absolutely no-one would use MySQL, and PostgreSQL would be even less
> popular. I am not suggesting the author had any bad intentions,
> perhaps he just chose by coincidence queries that Firebird handles
> well and the others dont. I know that we would dismiss the paper if it
> compared a select count(*) query.

The example queries fit in well with the sort of approach that is taken
in PHP applications - hence my own comments.

> Perhaps the PHP-Firebird components are more mature than the ones he
> used to connect to the others (although I doubt this could be true for
> MySQL, LAMP). Maybe the interface layer caused a bottleneck.

The php_interbase driver is not bad, but all the results will be hit
with the same 'interface'. I find that even wrapped in ADOdb, access to
the database is reasonable.

> More likely though, it is a testament to the self-tuning-ness of
> Firebird. Straight out of the box, Firebird generally has good
> performance. While there are a few parameters that can help in certain
> configurations, this is one of its key strengths. The hardware is
> relatively modest (in a DBMS server sense), and that is another
> strength of Firebird.

I'd be curious to see if the reason for the speed difference was simply
because Firebird had everything cached in memory while the others were
scanning the hard disk.

> I do love it when Firebird comes out on top of benchmarks, but not at
> the expense of the integrity of the conclusions reached. Perhaps a
> larger test using a lot more sample queries, complex joins etc
> repeated across several different interfaces PHP / C / Java / .Net /
> Delphi etc would give a more accurate picture of dbms performance.

Not something that I think we have time to complete, but I *AM* going to
run up bitweaver on Postgres and MySQL here and run some of the built in
stuff to see how they compare.

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.