Hi Alan,

You know, we have a project of Data Warehouse(DW) in Human Resource(HR)
field. We are doing some research work righ now. We like Firebird, because
it has small foot size , long developing history and easy maintain. Also,
Firebird is an open source Database system.

I used Benchw to test MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird. After testing, I found
Firebird is slow than MySQL and PostgreSQL. And I can't find some real DW
case using Firebird. So I don't know whether Firebird can handle DW system.

If you have some experience of designing DW using Firebird, could you share
your thought about Firebird in DW system?

Thanks

Cary


Cary,
I think the use of the term data warehouse can be misleading on it's own.
There are so many applications which call themselves as such and yet they
are all doing quite different things and expecting quite different things of
their backend.
Data storage is what all these database engines, to which you refer, try to
do best. Firebird is no different.
Nothing that I have done personally is what I, myself, call "data
warehousing" but what I consider to be the needs of data warehousing is far
more based around what the client application does, not what the RDBMS
inherently does. If you say that there are real cases using MySQL, then I
have no doubt that these cases could be carried out on Firebird with similar
performance and perhaps improved reliability and, as you say, improved
levels of maintenance.
That is why I said, tell us what you think are the shortcomings of the other
systems so we can compare.
You have said below that speed is an issue. I am not aware of BenchW or the
tests which are included. If you care to be more specific about these
findings I feel sure that others on the group will be fair minded about how
these tests can really be compared across different RDBMS. Often these tests
are optimised for one engine or they are written with little knowledge of
how to use the alternative engines at their best.
As for the basic requirements of data warehousing, storage size is no real
limitation for Firebird but that is no excuse to be lazy about your storage
design.

Let's hear more
Alan