On 6/15/2004 at 4:57 PM Phil Shrimpton wrote:

> On Tuesday 15 June 2004 15:47, Dan Wilson wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > I've started playing with ofbiz (www.ofbiz.org), and my first thought
> was
> > to reconfigure it to use Firebird.
> > Does anyone have any experience with this
> > application:
>
> No, but it is something we are going to be looking at in a few months, so
> any
> issues you come accross would be greatfully received. I gather from the
> FB
> general list there maybe an issue with indexes on strings (FB has a limit
> of
> 252 bytes), but not sure of the exact details.
>
> Phil

At first glance, the product is very impressive as it stands and with a lot of promise as they continue adding new features.

I had read about the index issue as well, but had interpreted the comments as an annoyance, not a showstopper, especially once I found firebird support in their entity config file. Unfortunately, they are indeed showstoppers. As things stand at this point, Firebird and ofbiz are NOT compatible. I am far from a relational database expert, but some of the things the ofbiz people have done in designing their data model seem like very poor decisions to this feeble brain. Specifically, they make use of multiple, 255-byte varchar fields as components of primary keys (i.e., a primary key might consist of field1(varchar 255), field2(varchar 255), field3(varchar 255), and field4(varchar 255)).

It is my understanding that Firebird 2 will relax the current restriction on length of index fields, which would indeed solve the compatibility problem. However, I have to believe that performance of the ofbiz product would be greatly improved by redesign of the data model to make use of integer or int64 id fields. I cringe at the thought of doing table scans and having to compare multiple large varchar fields for each and every row.

I will continue to explore this issue, but for now, we appear to be out of luck using Firebird with ofbiz.

Dan.