> First let me say I am love Firebird and think it is great. But I
> am not a fan (fan being short form for fanatic which means will
> not accept any criticism <g>).
>

<SNIP>

> So what are Firebirds strengths.
> 1. Firebird can be used in all these cases. So the scalability is
> simply fantastic. None of the competition can scale like this.
> (But then how many application do you know which need to run as a
> single user app as well and enterprise level application.
> For a programming shop standardising on Firebird because of the
> scalability, the problem is programmer turnover and level of
> expertise needed to write apps. So small owner programmer shops
> which take on all type of projects are probably a niche where
> Firebird is definetely the best fit - Wonder how many of the
> people on the list are like this.)
> 2. Very Very lean install for server.
> 3. Client access library is simple dll so absolutely simple
> deployment on clients.
> 4. Fantastic helpful community.
>
> I want Firebird to become the most popular database engine of
> all. So what do I think will make the difference.
>
> 1. Firebird should become more robust. (Even fresh/ beginner
> programmers should be able to use it easily)
> 2. Security model should improve. (I made a long post some time
> back about the access security model, which nobody picked up so I
> dropped it)
>
> I would love to contribute to the development. But I better at
> architecture and design of business apps and hopeless on the
> system level programming front. I read some of the postings
> regarding Vulcan on the website and my eyes started watering
> trying to get the basic concepts into my head
>
> gk
>

I agree with all this 100%
I'll raise again another issue once more and re-state how we doggedly argue
around the NULL equivalence issue here and ask again - hasn't anyone noticed
that it's a very often expressed confusion as to why newbies can't test for
something being equal to NULL? We keep arguing the point with them about
NULL's a state not a value.. yeh yeh - so what!
If we know how to determine if something is unknown and we know how to
determine how something else is unknown, why can't we admit to ourselves
that these two things are equivalent in there state?
Anyway - I'll drop this one again too. It's not worth all the effort
everytime I raise it. So you can bark at me all you like and I won't say a
word back
Alan