Roberto,

> > the members count of sourceforge section of
> borland-interbase source
> > tree is of 10 (ten) developers ( i don't know any )....
> >
> > the members of the new firebird project into sourceforge count 50
> > developer, and of these i know harrison, etc, the original
> writers of
> > the engine .....

To be fair to both groups, the size of the project team should not enter
in as a factor in your decision.

Of the 9 SF projects members for Interbase, 2 of the entries are
'dummy/placeholders' and one of the members is no longer with Borland.
The rest of the members represents almost the entire Interbase staff
that Borland has. In fact, the members of the project is currently
closed/restricted.

Of the 50 projects members, not all are active, that number changes
almost continually.

So the size of the project team should not influence your decision --
what the are doing or will be doing should.

> > now ..... what engine to choice ? Interbase 6 borland ?
> Firebird 1.0
> > from ibphoenix (original writers ). And the future ? We can
> expect 2
> > different engines, and 2 different formats ?

First, IBPhoenix are not the original writers -- Ann H certainly was
(and is married to Jim Starkey -- the original writer), but Paul B and
Paul R were not. Firebird is a separate entity from IBPhoenix although
we work very closely with them.

Right now, the Firebird engine is the original Interbase 6.0 engine,
which has had some relatively minor enhancements done and a number of
bug fixes. You can take a IB 6.0 database and copy it to the Firebird
engine without any backup and restore. Depending on which v1.0 features
you use, the same will be true of doing the reverse -- although Firebird
has added some things that Intercase can't deal with.


Will this stay the same?

No, there are a number of enhancements, IMHO long overdue, which will
result in the database file structures diverging. You can expect,
however, that Firebird will try and make any migration from Interbase as
easy as possible. It's is our best interest, the same won't be true of
Interbase.

> >
> > Can someone have experience with firebird 1 ?
> > Can firebird 1 have solved the main problems of ib6 official ?

Yes, Firebird has fixed a whole lot of bug which exist in the current
IB6 code, the complete list is on the Firebird web site.

> > - a best managing of the cache ( the 10.000 pages of limit .... and
> > the manager isn't dynamic but static in ib6 )
> > - a best support for SMP systems
> > - a best support of native NT performance enhancements ( overlapped
> > I/O, IOCompletionPorts for working threads, and using
> > criticalsections with affinitymask and not the orrible
> mutex/locking
> > obsolete mechanism? )

As with Interbase, a number of these issues our high on the "hit list",
but they will take some time to develop.

Also, unless Interbase is planning to do a major re-write of the code
(which is what Firebird has already started, with the v2 codebase) it is
*very doubtfull* that Interbase will be able to do some of these things.

> > IB6 or Firebird ?

I think the answer is obvious, but then again I'm biased ;-)


Sean