Thanks Paul for the info. The survey is being conducted by Mavenz, a
young consulting and software firm in India.

We are not just measuring the number of users of Firebird, which we
are certain will never be accurate. The survey does cover other
aspects and counting number of users is not our primary motive.

I appreciate your inputs and look forward to your participation.

Warm regards,

Nitin

--- In Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com, "paulruizendaal" <pnr@...>
wrote:

>
> Another thing that might be hampering your survey is that we had a
> similar survey in this list last year, organised by Carlos Cantu.

You

> may find it helpful to look at that survey as part of your

research.

>
> You may also want to look a similar survey by Evans Research, done
> last year. The report is not available for free, but there are

many

> press clippings about it.
>
> > I think you have a very valid point. I agree that the survey is

end-

> > user centric. We are basically trying to assess the reach and
> > acceptance that Firebird has achieved so far in the marketplace

and

> > amongst developers, its strengths and weaknesses as per the

actual

> > users and its readiness for Enterprise level applications.
>
> Can you disclose who this survey is for? If not by name, perhaps

by

> anonymised description?
>
> As you probably realised, answering your question through a survey

is

> somewhat problematic. You may recall the 1997 paper by Bob Young
> (then the CEO of Red Hat, these days the man behind

lulu.com) "Sizing

> the Linux market", which discusses the problems in finding a

workable

> methodology.
>
> Customer and instance counts are not easy to find in the RDBMS

world.

> For a example, I have not found a single public reference for

those

> two numbers for Oracle. However, you can find many snippets of
> information in the investor presentations and annual reports of

MS,

> IBM and Oracle.
>
> Measuring open source RDBMS numbers is even harder, as it combines
> industry secrecy with Bob Young's problem. People tend to go with
> proxies. For instance, MySQL acceptance was long derived by

counting

> internet-facing web servers running PHP and doing some math. As
> MySQL's share in PHP is falling, this no longer works.
>
> For a long time, measuring DB2 meant counting the number of AS/400
> boxes and doing some math. With the AS/400 world shrinking and DB2
> moving to other platforms, this no longer works.
>
> The general proxy for counting Firebird would be to count the

number

> of Delphi and C++Builder developers and applications and doing

some

> math. With Firebird deployments shifting to Java, C# and PHP, this

no

> longer works.
>
> So, problems abound. My estimates would be:
> MySQL: 5 million instances, falling
> SQLServer: 4 million instances, rising
> FB/IB: 3 million instances, stable
> Oracle: 1 million instances, rising
> DB2: 1 million instances, falling
>
> Hope the above helps.
>
> Paul
>