Hi

In our company we are currently looking into the possibility of migrating our product away from MySQL to an alternative RDBMS, and I told my boss I had worked with Firebird a few years ago when I was writing my thesis; but that was for a Windows/Delphi application. In our company we are working with Linux and the core db application in our product involves bulk inserts and deletes of records (up to hundreds of records per second), so we are looking for something that is pretty fast. It's not about bulk inserts just once, it's about bulk inserts all the time, and we have a database maintenance process in our application that can be configured to delete old records if the db becomes to full. We have observed that insert performance also decreases after many rounds of such deletions.
When I worked with Firebird, it was rather a necessity (good API for Delphi) than a performance decision, and I didn't have much database experience at all back then. But in the meantime I have heard from other people that Firebird is also a pretty speedy db; is this true?
The best thing we would want to get of course is Mysql MYISAM-like performance, but I know this is impossible, unless we use MYISAM, but this is not an option because it is not crash safe. So we are also looking for a crash safe solution. At the moment we use Mysql with the InnoDB engine, which is really a bit over the top for us, as our application doesnt really need transactions, so we believe we lose a lot on the performance side for the sake of transactions which we don't need. InnoDB speed is acceptable, though. We also tried MariaDB but the results were rather disappointing.
I would also like to know about licensing issues with firebird. Which license is the fbclient C API subject to? Might Firebird be just what we're looking for?

Many thanks

Martin