Hi.

I am a junior developer building a system for a mid-tier content services
(not porn) company. I'm new to this technology and this list. So, first of
all, hi!

We budgeted an entire month into choosing an RDBMS. I would be happy to
write a prose "novice user experience" piece as we continue with
implementation.

I have never run a database system by myself (I'm kinda young), so I was
initially attracted to mysql for a number or reasons. Among them: a robust
user community, usability, speed, tons of third party tools, and simplicity.
Figured out that while InnoDB table types make mysql more robust and
basically transactional (people have pointed out to me that there are no
hard-fast rules for RDBMS i.e. ACID compliance), it lacks triggers, stored
procedures, and views. Now, everyone screams CODE THEM INTO THE APPLICATION
YOU LAMER!! But the spec for the project calls for an implementation using
MS Access as a client...no flexibility there, hence no mysql. Another option
was coding a FoxPro layer sitting between Access and mysql, a route I was
genuinely afraid of...

I also looked at postgresql- but the db server is going to run on win 2k, I
didn't really want to have a production server that I had to administrate
via a cygwin bash shell...and getting it to auto-start as a service and
auto-restart when it crashed was kinda hairy. I use linux for personal uses
and to have a lot of fun, but am not experienced enough to fix a RedHat or
SuSE box in a production environment. I'm the first to admit, a more
experienced sysadmin probably could have licked the problems in less time,
but ergo sum: I found postgresql lacked usability and a visual development
tool, pgAdmin is more like IBconsole.

So I did what I always do; I posted to various lists. Low and behold, a
friend on the mysql list suggested that if the app was data-critical, to
take a look at firebird...I did, and I couldn't be more pleased. His analogy
"mysql is a jeep, and interbase is a tank. Sometimes, you need a jeep, and
sometimes you need a tank." made a lot of sense to me.

I could go on, but i'll wrap it up- I love it so far. I could list the
reasons, but I think most people on the list could do that better than I, so
I'll not regurgitate what we all know already: Firebird is great RDBMS. It's
got the maturity of a commercial product, and the free-ness and user
community of open source. In the land of the data-critical, who could ask
for anything more?

Since I'm not at the level where I can work on the code (yet:) I'd be happy
to contribute to the firebird project in any way I can.

Also, I'll email Andy Riebs at OSDB http://sourceforge.net/projects/osdb -
I know he's looking for someone to work on Interbase support. Maybe someone
on the list wants to get involved??

Cheers!

jd

-----Original Message-----
From: Ann W. Harrison [mailto:aharrison@...]
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 11:26 AM
To: ib-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [ib-support] OT: comments re: attracting users to interbase


At 08:28 AM 2/7/2002 -0800, Rob Schuff wrote:

>... there needs to be a ... feature-by-feature comparison of the three. A
>white paper I suppose...i.e. some strong marketing. Is there such a thing
>planned, in existence, etc?

Anyone on this list who has experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL, please
contact me. I can pull together some feature lists from the documentation,
but there's nothing like real experience. MySQL has a comparison tester
called crashme which works very badly with Firebird. If anyone would
like to try to improve it, that would help us a lot.

For a talk that I'm about to give at an OSDN (open source developers'
network) conference, I'm suggesting that:

MySQL is designed to be a blindingly fast back-end to a web server
but lacks features needed for read-write processing.

PostgreSQL lacks the "active database" features of Firebird -
triggers for view updates, computed columns, select procedures,
etc. Their triggers and stored procedures seem more like our
UDFs.

Do remember that our competition is not MySQL or PosgreSQL, but
Microsoft and Oracle. There's space in the world for different
databases with different focus.


Regards,

Ann



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