Re: Postgres vs Firebird?

while we're on "scalability", any thoughts on needs/plans for 64-bit PG?

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Scott Marlowe
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 3:19 PM
To: lists(at)benjamindsmith(dot)com
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Postgres vs Firebird?

On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 13:48, Benjamin Smith wrote:
> As a long-time user of Postgres, (First started using it at 7.0) I'm
> reading
> recently that Firebird has been taking off as a database.
>
> Perhaps this is not the best place to ask this, but is there any
> compelling
> advantage to using Firebird over Postgres? We have a large database (almost
> 100 tables of highly normalized data) heavily loaded with foreign keys and
> other constraints, and our application makes heavy use of transactions.
>
> I say this as my company's growth has been exponential, showing no
> sign of
> letting up soon, and I'm reviewing clustering and replication technologies so
> that we can continue to scale as nicely as we have to date with our single
> server. (now with a load avg around .30 typically)

With some of the changes Tom recently made in the code in CVS, PostgreSQL now looks capable of scaling to >4 CPUS (somewhere between 8 and 12 is where things start to drop off suddenly) while for firebird, handling >1 CPU is a relatively recent development.

I'd say try them both, benchmark them, and see what you think. But keep in mind that you really need to use a 4+ CPU machine to get a feel for the scalability of both in a large server environment.

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