Why we all sell code with bugs – firebird mentioned

[Quoting from this article where firebird is mentioned http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1781895,00.html]

For instance, our product, Vault, stores all data using Microsoft SQL Server. Some people don’t like this. We’ve been asked to port the back end to Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Firebird. This issue is in our bug database as item 6740. The four questions would look like this:

· Severity: People who refuse to use SQL Server can’t use Vault.

· Frequency: This “bug” affects none of our users; it merely prevents a group of people from using our product.

· Cost: Very high. Vault’s backend makes extensive use of features specific to Microsoft SQL Server. Contrary to popular belief, SQL isn’t portable. Adapting the backend for any other database would take months, and the maintenance costs of two back ends would be quite high.

· Risk: The primary risk lies in any code changes made to the server to enable it to speak to different backend implementations of the underlying SQL store.