I am starting to be of the opinion that the best option is to just use the GDS32.dll directly. The components are cute, and work well for prototyping, but they appear to be lacking adequate stability for serious enterprise scale uses, IMHO.

Also bear in mind that the timestamp conversion function in gds32.dll drops the milliseconds, so you may want to write your own replacement for that. It's not a big deal, but it'll save you a lot of hunting when you know in advance that the fractional seconds are truncated at the GDS32 layer from all times that are stored.

----- Original Message -----
From: Erik Raul Chan Silveira
To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2004 3:08 PM
Subject: Re: [firebird-support] MS SQL Vs. Firebird Again


Sounds good David:
would you please tell us what tool(component) you
recommend for accesing firebird.

with regards
Erik

--- David Johnson <d_johnson@...>
escribió:
---------------------------------
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



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