On 10 Jun 2002 at 20:19, Daniel Bertin wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm presenting a proposal and want to compare FirebirdSQL to
> another database server maybe 2
>
> Would MS-SQL be valid choice? where would I find a document which
> would do such a comparison

Usually such comparisons are notoriously difficult to find, because some engines
have as a condition of licence that you can't do such comparisons. Other then that
it depends on outside factors, some products are better at some tasks then others.

A Quick comparison having seen a number of products, and info on others. MS-
SQL is a fork of Sybase for Windows (Version 10 I think), it's not a bad product, but
suffers as most Microsoft products due, from a nasty case of featuritis, nearly every
feature you could crowbar into a DB engine is there. It also suffers from the logging
problems that Sybase has, in order to implement transactions, it uses a log file to
hold the differences, this log has a nasty habit of getting very large unless you run a
maintenance utility on it.

Oracle is another popular one, problem is to get any kind of decent performance it
needs it's gazillion configuration options set properly, and that requires a PhD in
Oracle. Seemed to work okay when I used it (as a programmer).

Firebird seems to work well, the licence to use it is free of cost, it doesn't have
millions of features that nobody uses, it doesn't need a 64bit int to hold the number
of configuration options, most of the servers RAM is used to hold data, and not the
engine. You are secured in the fact that you can get the source code, and fix any
bugs that cause you serious problems yourself, this gives you the advantage of the
product can't simply disappear on you. Did I mention that it's free?





Paul Schmidt, President
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com