Hi Sanjay,

>>We plan to use FB
>>in 24x7 environments (healthcare)
>>
>>Is it safe / recommended ?

We are doing it since a few months. Our experience with Interbase /
Firebird ist quite good, but you have to mention some important
points (possibly points are missing in my list):

1. We were using Firebird Classic Server on a Redhat Linux SMP box.
About two months ago we got strange errors with corrupt index and
data pages. We allways could repair the database via backup and
restore, but the database has actually a size of about 35 GB and
contains more than 20 millions of records. So backup and restore takes
a lot of time. We could solve the problem by switching to the Firebird
Super Server but up to now we do not know exactly what caused the
errors. I suggest actually not to use a SMP machine.

2. Ever, ever use the setting FORCED WRITES ON!!!

3. Running a backup under Firebird is like running any other
transaction. So a backup contains all data commited at the starting
time of your backup. Performance is quite fair during backup.

4. As far as i know there is no(!) redo log utility like in Oracle. I
would like to have it, but i did not find such a tool. If you need to
recover your data after a crash to a state after your last backup, you
have no tool to do this. Start keing in :-(
I'm currently thinking of realising it by myself, but I'm not a good
C++ programmer...

5. Pay attention to the size of your database files. If the one or the
last file of your database grows over the maximum file size of your
OS, your database will be corrupted.

6. Pay attention with sweep. We switched it off. Sweep is now done in
a low usage time (started with a cron job).

Hope my suggestions will help you.

Best regards
Micha