On 8 Aug 2002 at 6:28, brycetate wrote:

> Firebird users,
> I am working on a project, whose budget cannot handle the likes of
> oracle, sybase, etc, so I have turned to the open source community for
> help. After some quick reading it appears although mySQL is popular
> it lacks many features, compliance, and reliability. I have heard
> good things about postgreSQL and Interbase/firebird. I have a few
> questions that I am hoping you all can answer for me, or point to in
> the right direction.
> First, on the firebird website's FAQ it lists supported platforms,
> but does not mention win9x/2k/xp, but yet I see people talking about
> firebird being installed on win2k systems...so I went to the
> download's section to see if I could get a win copy, the only windows
> version, "super server", did not mention which version(s) of windows
> it supports. Can I get clarification on what windows platforms
> firebird is available on?

It should work on 98, ME, NT, 2K and XP, however if your on a budget, skip
Windows altogether, use Linux instead, it's faster, cheaper and more reliable. ME
and XP have a problem, system restore includes the extension .gdb, so you either
need to try and disable this, or use a different extension (I like fbdb personally).

> Also, I will need a Mac OS X version, which it shows as being
> supported only by the "classic server" version. What is the
> difference between the superserver and classic server versions of
> firebird? I searched the firebird website and didn't see anything
> about them (if they are there just point me to the URL)!

They work differently, superserver is newer, and runs as a daemon (or service),
it starts a new thread for each connection, where as classic starts a new process for
each connection. On some systems, like Windows, processes are very expensive
(meaning they take a lot of resources to start and run), where as on some other
systems, it's almost as cheap to start and run a process as a thread. Now SMP is
process based, so if your running multiple processors you want to go classic, since
most of the Mac servers are dualies you probably want classic anyway.

> Lastly, this probably belongs in a QT group, but I am interested to
> get the opinions of active firebird users.....has anyone used firebird
> through QT3? Any problems, or good points? And I noticed there are 2
> ODBC drivers for firebird, does anyone recommend one over the other
> for use with QT?

I assume you mean Trolltechs Qt, don't know much about it, other then I didn't like
the licence, a few years ago. As for ODBC there are 4 drivers, Easysoft and
Gemini which are commercial, Xtg and OdbcJdbc which are freeware. I have used
Gemini and it works pretty well, not sure these days about Xtg, OdbcJdbc is
improving on almost a daily basis, you need to try it and see. Your best bet,
download the trial versions of Easysoft and Gemini, download the latest versions of
Xtg and OdbcJdbc and try all 4, if you go with Linux on the server, you should have
lots of money left for a commercial odbc driver.

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