Nick Upson wrote:

>
> I was under the impression, for example, that the Query optimiser
> had been improved after v4.
>

The query optimiser was certainly changed. Some might say for the worse. The
main improvement, introduced in v5, was the handling of SQL-92 JOIN
statements. Previously you had to do joins using the WHERE clause to get
reasonable performance. So unless you have been a stickler for SQL-92
conformance you will not be using JOINs anyway.

> I'm trying to 'sell' moving to FB and the best thing I can say is
> something like "we could expect an average 50% improvement over v4 speed".
>

If you had 100 concurrent users and switched to Fb Superserver you could
probably argue that speed could improve by more than 100%. As I said before, a
lot does depend on the kind of DB design, application usage etc. The magic
bullet is probably the super server architecture, but you wont notice this on
a 10-user system.

Overall you may see some performance improvements in some areas. However, I
would look at pitching other benefits too, such as bug-fixes, dialect 3, int64
(for financial apps), larger page sizes (another possible perf. tweak), 64-bit
file i/o etc. Borland's site should have docs outlining all the new features
in v5 and v6. And the release notes for FB 1.0 on sourceforge have the new
features of Firebird. All in all a lot of things are there to make the switch
worthwhile.


Paul
--

Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
taking InterBase further