Thanks Daniel. I appreciate your response. I will be going with Fb
for my development as it meets my current requirements. Main reasons
being a small footprint, trigger/stored procedure support and stable
Windows release. I plan to use this in a POS system where the
application will run on a single machine at branch sites w/o network
and Fb's low resource requirements plus zero maintenance will really
save a lot of hassles.

But also will be keeping an eye on PostgreSQL as it seems to have
some interesting features. Is there any link/article on the
advantages of Fb over PostgreSQL feature wise?

Thanks & Regards,
Ubaidullah Nubar,
C55, CPD2.1+LPM,
ASP,PHP - CodeCharge
PB+PFC

--- In ib-support@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Rail <daniel@a...> wrote:
> > Hi all,
>
> > I have recently been considering Firebird. Is there any
comprehensive
> > comparison between Firebird and PosgreSQL? I found the following
> > links:
>
> > http://www.dbexperts.net/documentation/comparison
> > http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/db/
>
> > Firebird is not compared very favorably in these two links,
probably
> > because it is not as well known as PostgreSQL. The second link
even
> > has many unknowns(?) in the column for Fb features. This is why I
> > thought it better to ask this ng.
>
> > Could somebody enlighten me if Fb has support for the following:
> > 1. Concurrent Transactions
> If this means more than one transaction per connection, then yes.
> But, if this means a transaction within another one, then no. FB
1.5
> will support SAVE POINTS which is part of SQL-99.
> > 2. SQL ANSI 99
> It's in the process. The developers are looking at following SQL-99
> in further developments.
> > 3. ODBC access (The first link suggests that it is not free for
Fb)
> There are some open source ODBC and OLE-DB drivers, look on
> www.ibphoenix.com
> > 4. Unicode support
> Yes it does. The only place where it's not fully supported and it's
> when creating your WHERE clause, Firebird has a hard time coping
with
> the special characters in the search string. Other than that, it
> works.
> > 5. Schemas
> > 6. Online backups
> Yes.
> > 7. Cancel a query asynchronously
> > 8. Boolean field
> It's being talked about and a possibility for FB 1.5(I can't say for
> sure)
> > 9. unlimited row size (if not what is the maximum with v1.5/2.0)
> No. The row size limit is 32767 bytes. I find it to be more than
> enough. Also, the BLOBs are stored outside of the row, so one could
> say that the row size is unlimited by using BLOBs.
> > 10. User defined types
> FB has domains. But, if this means that the user could define a
> datatype that is non-existent in FB, i.e. GUID, then no.
> > 11. Full text indexing
> No. But, can be implemented by third-party products. It's not a
> feature that everybody uses.
> > 12. Can functions written in other languages be used in Stored
> > Procedures (via dll/lib)
> Yes. These are the User Defined Functions.
> > 13. Functions for default value of columns
> Not that I'm aware of.
> > 14. Regular expression support
> Yes. You use the LIKE in your WHERE clause.
> > 15. EXPLAIN command
> No. And, it's not a SQL-92 or SQL-99 keyword.
> > 16. LIMIT keyword
> FB has the FIRST keyword to limit the number of rows returns.
> > 17. FETCH command
> Yes.
> > 18. Indexes on functions
> Yes it's possible. You specify the position of the returned column
in
> your ORDER BY.
>
> These were answered to the best of my knowledge.
>
> Have a nice day.
>
> Daniel Rail
> Senior System Engineer
> ACCRA Group Inc. (www.accra.ca)
> ACCRA Med Software Inc. (www.accramed.ca)