Hi,

At June 28, 2003, 12:31, Radu-Mihail Obada wrote:

> I come from a PostgreSQL background, so I'm used with highly-
> scalable, highly avaiable DBMSs. The question is, how much can
> Firebird scale?

If you plan to use Firebird in an SMP environment and use all available
processors, install Firebird Classic Server. If your needs only
require Firebird to run on a single processor, then Super Server will
work nicely. If you want to use Firebird in a clustered environment,
then none of them are ready for that right now.

> Say I have a 500-600M database, would that hurt the performance of
> my application? Can Firebird fulfill the needs of a (small, but
> rapidly growing) entreprise?

With proper indices defined, not at all. Some users on this list have
databases over 30GB and multi-million records on the tables.

> I'm interested in all the
> aspects of the problem... just because I like Firebird so much. It
> hasn't been that long since I've started using Firebird (a month),
> but till now, I've been only playing with it, haven't done any
> serious work. So I want to know if it's ready for hitting the lights,
> so to say.

I don't know if you know, but Firebird originated with the open-source
version of Interbase back in 2000. If you want to see the timeline of
Interbase and Firebird, check Claudio's website:
http://www.cvalde.com/IbRoadmap.htm

There are a few names that you'll see in that time-line that are
involved in some way with Firebird. To name a few: Ann Harrison(one of
the project admins), Paul Beach(some of the development), Jim
Starkey(architectural discussions, especially he had his hands in the
code before Borland bought it and is the original creator of Interbase).

> One more thing: how ANSI compliant, after all?

Most of Firebird's DDL/DML syntax is SQL-92/99 compliant.

--
Best regards,
Daniel Rail
Senior System Engineer
ACCRA Group Inc. (www.accra.ca)
ACCRA Med Software Inc. (www.filopto.com)