Re: Postgres vs Firebird?

Why not try both, by configuring a database and running your
applications against both systems? Kick the plug out of the wall during
the middle of a transaction. Run a simulated load of 10,000 users
against it. If you are growing exponentially, it will be much cheaper
to do your experiments now than five years from now, when everything has
grown to titanic size.

If you use a standards based interface like ODBC, OLEDB, JDBC or a .NET
provider, then you can point your applications at the new system by
simply changing the data source name.

With all other things being about equal, I prefer PostgreSQL because of
its superior license scheme.

It also appears to me that the PostgreSQL community is more active than
the Firebird community and that more interesting research is happening
using PostgreSQL as a base.

But I certainly would not try to dissuade you. Rather, I suggest that
you use standards based interfaces to your database systems and then the
data store becomes practically irrelevant, in that you can choose it or
change it on a whim.

On the other hand, if you have a huge investment in using pqlib as your
interface, then I think it will be a lot harder to move to a new system.
In such a circumstance, you should measure your choices much more
carefully.
If you have thousands of lines of PostgreSQL specific stored procedures,
then you must also take that into consideration.

Probably, nobody can be in a better position to know if a move might
have benefit than you are.

While you are at it, you might also try commercial database systems and
additional open source choices. Why narrow the choice to two systems
when there are a large number of possibilities? Of course, the testing
effort will be proportional to the number of systems you implement.

Remember also that 80% of the cost of any software system is
maintenance. Does your organization have expertise in the target
systems that you are considering? If not, then you are doing them a
great disservice.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-general-
> owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Smith
> Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 11:49 AM
> To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [GENERAL] Postgres vs Firebird?
>
> 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)
>
> -Ben
> --
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
> - XEROX PARC slogan, circa 1978
>
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