> I have installed FB 1.03 in an IBM NetFinity 2 processor 64 Bits AIX
> machine. I have also loaded in part of the data of our currently
> running Oracle database. Actually, I´m doing performance tests for
> choosing between Firebird and Postgres as an Open Source database we
> would like to implement in the company for some of the applications.
> One of the tables I loaded is 4.127.269 records long. I didn´t include
> in any of the test databases anything that can improve performance
> like indexes and tablespaces. Just created the tables, loaded the data
> and run the queries right after database installation. Firebird
> performed far worst than Postgres. What´s wrong ? FB 1.03 isn´t using
> all the machine´s power ? Or it´s only using 1 processor ? Do I have
> to compile it for 64 Bits and multiprocessor ? 1.5.1 would perform
> better ? I don´t have much experience in compiling Linux souce. But
> I´m really willing to try if somebody say to me that it will be at
> least comparable with Postgres performace.

1. Currently Firebird is only 32bit... 64bit ports are on their way
via the Vulcan project within Firebird.
2. Just what precisely did you download for the AIX system? This is very IMPORTANT....
Because there is no 1.03 for AIX, and if you did download the AIX PPC
build it would be a Classic server and would use more than one CPU,
if enough processes e.g. 2 were accessing the database...
Are you using AIX in a Linux mode?
3. By default Firebird's basic configuration is lean and mean, so there
are a number of parameters you can increase to improve performance.

> In case that the performace is comparable and I need to compile it for
> my machine, sorry but some parts of these instructions are very
> confusing. Are them on-line somewhere ? for example:

Those notes were written by me, to detail how to build Firebird 1.5
on HPUX - not AIX, since so far we only have builds of 1.5 on Windows,
Linux, MacOS and Solaris Intel, you are going to have to start from scratch
re. setting up the config for a build on AIX. Nobody has yet done it.
If you follow the instructions and see what I did, you can do the same for
AIX. If you want to build for Linux, it should build pretty much out of the box.

Paul