Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu wrote:

> I never understood why FB didn't do better over MySQL. MySQL was such an
> incredibly basic and IMO crippled DB.

Being well integrated with Linux and PHP, MySQL become de facto standard
for web applications running on Internet (intranet is a different
story). As it is free, many (all?) web hosting providers give LAMP
package by default. This is not quite the market segment FB is aiming
at, but it created a lot of hype around MySQL, and many people think
this way:

commercial database = Oracle
open-source database = MySQL

The hype increased the market for books as well, so now you have tons of
documentation on MySQL which many people I know cited as really
important thing compared to Firebird.


--
Milan Babuskov
http://swoes.blogspot.com/
http://www.flamerobin.org