Paul,

Thanks for the references and the brilliant idea to interview these
individuals. I'll contact them to see if they are available and free
for such interviews. I wouldn't want to comment on Enterprise
readiness of FB at the moment, however, I must inform you that I
have come across senior officials in many companies who are not even
aware of Firebird. Some who knew have compared Firebird to MS
Access :-) without even using it. There is a huge population out
there who is unaware of this RDBMS and its capabilities. We are
making a humble attempt to make others know of it and hence we
require people to participate in the survey.

Regards,
- Nitin

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

>
> > 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 am happy to hear your survey is going well, and look forward to
> seeing the results on FirebirdNews.
>
> For the other two stated purposes (developer acceptance,

enterprise

> readiness) you should be aware of built-in biases that may occur:
>
> - Firebird 'just works', it has this habbit of going out of your

way.

> Many developers working with FB/IB don't have to bother with

tracking

> FB from day to day and filling out a survey.
>
> - FB has large communities in Brazil and Russia. I suspect they

will

> be much underrepresented in an english language survey. Perhaps

your

> survey is proving me wrong, with 50% of responses from those
> countries; I don't know.
>
> - "Enterprise" users (as in organisations with >1,000 PC's) are

imho

> very likely not to respond in the survey.
>
> I am not trying to put down your excellent initiative, just
> cautioning on how to interpret the results. Perhaps it would be

good

> if you interviewed a few people with known enterprise level
> deployments:
>
> - SAS presented about their use of FB on the last conference
> - Contact Fikret Hasovic for info about the usage of FB by the tax
> authorities of Bosnia & Herzegovnia
> - Contact Paul Beach about usage by Adarvo Ltd (50 gig data, 2000
> users)
> - Contact Paul Reeves about usage by the German Press Agency
> - etc.
>
> For me "enterprise readiness" is not a question, it is a given.
>
> Paul
>