A million records is nothing. I have been using 4 million records as a baseline test scenario.

I used to think (wrongly) that 7gb was the largest an interbase installation could achieve. I have since read that 32 TB is the theoretical limit. MS SQL has one installation that has hit 64 TB.

With good indexing, with an untuned installation, average performance in a worst case scenario was 1.5 I/O per seek. (call it 15 ms access time per record worst case). Firebird appears to keep its indexes well balanced because there was no observable performance difference between that experienced following an insert of 4,000,000 rows and that experienced after dropping and rebuilding the indexes.

Caution: Beware of the DBXpress and IBXpress components used by some Delphi and BCB apps. My testing has exposed memory leaks and other serious issues with the middle layers, and the Delphi VCL architecture imposes minimum 3% maximum 30% overheads on top of the database performance.

The MAX, MIN, and Count operators are not as well optimized as they could be either. MAX and MIN can at least be optimized somewhat be ascending and descending indeces where they are required. Count on an entire table will always do a table space scan.

Helen is the real authority

----- Original Message -----
From: abarragan
To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2004 4:37 AM
Subject: [firebird-support] MS SQL Vs. Firebird Again


English
===============================
Good morning

I´m a developer that have found in Firebird an excellent tool for
applications that I have designed. This consultation has a very
specific objective: I begint to to work in a company in which
several machines uses M$ $QL $erver. It happens that it is wanted to
implement a DataWarehouse and we do not have the necessary licenses.
In addition another servant, another license of operating system
requires itself, in synthesis MONEY. And I put myself to make
accounts and the thing is VERY EXPENSIVE.

Good, all this to say to them: it is possible to arm a DataWarehouse
with Firebird (I am speaking of million records), to put it in a
Linux Server, build the cube, to access through Windows stations and
to analyze the data by means of some OLAP tool (Data Analyzer,
Bussiness Objects, etc.) That experience could contribute to me?

Thanks for your attention

Augusto

Spanish
=================================
Buenos días

Como desarrollador he encontrado en Firebird una excelente
herramienta para el desenvolvimiento de las aplicaciones que he
diseñado. Esta consulta tiene un objetivo muy específico: entré a
trabajar en una compañía en la cual utilizan M$ $QL $erver en varias
máquinas. Sucede que se quiere implementar un DataWarehouse y nos
damos cuenta que no poseemos las licencias necesarias. Además se
requiere otro servidor, otra licencia de sistema operativo, en
síntesis VIL DINERO. Y me puse a hacer cuentas y la cosa es TENAZ.
Bueno, todo esto para decirles: es posible armar un DataWarehouse
con Firebird (estoy hablando de millones de registros), ponerlo en
un servidor Linux, crear un cubo de datos, accesarlo a través de
estaciones Windows y poder
analizar los datos mediante alguna herramienta OLAP (Data analyzer,
Bussiness Objects, etc.) Que experiencia me podrían aportar?

Gracias por su atención

Augusto




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