I have been following this thread for a while now, but I couldn't
think of one until this morning.

Firebird: So good, Mozilla borrowed our name.

Not too sure about how that would go down :)

Seriously though.

A lot of emphasis has been placed on marketing Firebird in the areas
that are not its strongest. I don't want to throw a wet blanket on
things, but storing particular character sets is not as powerful as it
needs to be before bragging about internationalisation. And there are
some HT and multi processor issues that need to be sorted before it is
ready for particular users.

But it is not all bad news.

For example, MySQL is only now introducing ACID compliancy etc. Thats
nice, but it is going to take a while to iron out teething issues
before it becomes safe to use. PostgreSQL has only recently had a
official windows port.

I believe one of the big sell points is that it is totally free to use
and distribute with any software, no matter how you decide to license.
It is a proven dbms, with very low maintenance overheads, excellent
performance, a tiny footprint (both disk and memory), with an active
development and support community.

Firebird sells itself. We can be upfront with areas of weakness,
because we would rather someone use a different dbms if Firebird can't
do whatever they required than have them badmouth it.

My 2c

Adam