I don't have a whitepaper, just a few observations. I have not yet
worked with a large scale Firebird installation, although I have been
trying to study the concept in between other issues. At our shop,
Oracle is what we are forced to use for some of our smaller systems, so
my Oracle experience is not especially extensive either.

What is the scale of your operation? Can your operation be comfortably
run on x86 architecture machines for the forseeable future, or will you
need to move to something with more beef right away?

Firebird has features comparable to any commercial offering, but for the
time being it is limited to a small number of architectures (32 bit x86,
and macintosh).

Oracle is more complex to install, configure and maintain than Firebird.
Many of the tuning options of Oracle are not available in Firebird, but
the intent of the Firebird architecture is that the product is supposed
to be self tuning to a large extent.

Oracle has better JDBC support - the support for batching more than
doubles the throughput of my migration tool.

Oracle has the lion's share of the database market, so commercial
applications tend to be written to Oracle's specifications and quirks.

Oracle supports compiler hints, which are really a kludge because the
optimizer should be smart enough to know, for example, that a prepared
statement "Insert into myTable (f1, f2) values (?,?)" will always be
appending to the table. In any large scale shop, you will need to hire
a full time Oracle Optimizer, since Oracle's SQL optimizer sucks.

The 64 bit build of Firebird had some issues last I heard. Oracle has
had full 64 bit support for a number of platforms for some time.

With Oracle, after the initial installation, $upport i$ co$tly.
Firebird support, in contrast, is much more responsive and free (via
this mailing list), or paid support is available through IBPhoenix and
others for much less than Oracle will charge.

I have heard that an ancestor of Firebird is used in the M1 Abrams tank.
If this can be verified, then Firebird meets US Military specs.

You may want to check out the IB Phoenix web site.

The thing about Firebird is that if you change your mind you haven't
spent any money, so a move to Oracle does not cost you any more than if
you started out that way (provided your applications don't care what
DBMS is underneath them). On the other hand, if you choose Oracle up
front, you have committed a large sum of money and you had better be
certain that it will actually do more for you than Firebird.

I'm not sure how useful this will be, but I hope it gives you a start.

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 01:21 +0000, RayJenkins wrote:
>
>
> Oracle is putting the hard sell on management and I was wondering if
> theres a good whitepaper or something that does a good comparison
> between Oracle and Firebird.
>
> I am sold on Firebird, but Oracle is pushing scalability and stability
> of Oracle vs OpenSource among other things. So a little documentation
> would help me defend Firebird.
>
> Sorry if this doesn't belong in this user group, please point me to a
> place to ask this question if it doesn't belong here.
>
> Ray
>