>>the "Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing" (http://www.faw.at)
>>in cooperation with "Fabalabs Software GmbH"
>>(http://www.fabalabs.org) have made a new Open Source DBMS evaluation
>>document available, comparing Firebird 1.5.2, Ingres r3 3.0.1, MaxDB
>>7.5.0.23, MySQL 4.1.10 and PostgreSQL 8.0.1 in different areas.
>>
>>The document can be downloaded here:
>>http://www.fabalabs.org/research/papers/FabalabsResearchPaper-OSDB
>>MS-Eval.pdf
>
>
> Wow, it's thorough document.

Yeah, about 6 man-months of work, so the size is fine, I guess. ;-)

If there are any typos or grammatical niggles, then I'm the right one to
bug, 'cause I was responsible for writing the text and doing some QA
work. If you find any errors in the evaluation of Firebird or MaxDB,
then it's me again, who should be bugged. ;-)

If you are unhappy with the evalation of the three other products, then
this was someone else' fault.

Our main goal was, of course, to evaluate each participant in an
objective way, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to do that admittedly
hard work. There was no winner. Each product has its strengths and
weaknesses.

Evaluating Firebird was a pleasure, due to the excellent available
documentation (Helen's book, IBPhoenix publications and patience answers
in different Firebird related newsgroups). Thanks folks!

Firebird is doing an excellent job, compared to the others! I would be
interested in how far Firebird would have grown, with the money of CA,
MySQL, SAP ... ;-)

Yesterday, we presented our study to an audience of ~30 peoples,
including representatives from Oracle, Microsoft, Computer Associates
(Ingres) and small to midsize companies. Discussions afterwards have
shown, that there *IS* a demand for Open Source DBMS, really! Ehm, not
for Oracle and Microsoft of course. ;-)

Cheers,
Thomas