I think where-ever you see the words zero administration, it needs to
be taken with a grain of common sense.

Of course there is some administration with every database system.
There are file system permissions to consider, aliases to be created,
firewall ports to be forwarded, backup scripts to be written and
exceptions to be created in the virus scanner and backup software
paths so they do not interfere with the running of it.

In addition to this, larger systems need to have additional resources
allocated for the system to operate reasonably. Sometimes VPNs will
need to be set up, or over the wire encryption and compression tools
such as Zebedee will need to be used, but again does this honestly
count as an administration cost.

But let me assure you if my job was to maintain the Firebird
databases, I would be very bored. I mean I suppose I could do a
backup-restore cycle once a year , and possibly update the statistics
and sweep from time to time, but I would be spending a lot of time
playing solitaire.

Firebird self tunes itself, meaning I do not have to play around with
a million memory settings before the thing works beautifully. Sure
there are a few settings in Firebird.conf that may be worth
considering, but it is really a set and forget system.

Let me assure you that other systems require much more SYSDBA
interaction to keep the thing running.

But I seriously hope that you have misinterpretted what the consultant
says about indices. Creating an index is not an "administration
costs", but are essential to the design of the system. Let me assure
you that Oracle, MSSQL, DB2 etc don't scale to well if you don't
create any index either. If your consultant truly believes that the
fact you need to use indices to make a system scalable is an
administration cost, then he must be very confused as to what
administration costs are.

That said, there are some scalability issues with Firebird. In
particular SMP support and some minor issues with HT. So Firebird is
not yet suitable for every rdbms requirement, but it deserves more
credit than the write off you seem to have been given.

What sort of scalability and performance requirements does your system
have? I can tell you that in the places in our application that we are
waiting for Firebird, you can nearly always trace it back to
inefficiently written triggers that get indirectly called by the
operation, or queries that have no supporting index.

In summary, zero administration is a marketing term. It refers to the
fact that you certainly do not need to have an employed DBA to manage
a Firebird database, which makes it a lot more scalable into markets
where you would have smaller employees etc. Imagine a company of 5
employees having to employee a DBA? When you have 2000 employees, it
is affordable, but it really is a deal breaker in smaller places.

Adam