Category: Worth Reading

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Hi all,

I have seen some comparisons of Firebird to other open source
databases, however, the list is not very extensive. Further,
most of the comparisons are not referencing Firebird 2.0, but
an earlier version of Firebird. I am hoping that someone could
point me in the direction of something that would tell me:

* Why is Firebird 2.0 better than MySQL or Postgres?
* Feature per feature, how does Firebird 2.0 stack up?
* Are there comparisons showing Administrative, Programmatic,
and Performance between the databases (including Firebird
2.0)?

I know this is a big task and I won’t be surprised if it
hasn’t been done, but I am sure many people out there trying
to make a decision on which database to choose would like to
see the advantages and disadvantages to Firebird 2.0.

An article from one or more of you who are knowledgeable in
the subject could really help out the adoption of FB 2.0.

And jim’s answer :

I think the short answer is that nobody with the experience to do this
is interested in doing it. I know that this isn’t a particularly useful
answer, but I’m afraid it is the truth.

Better is a subjective term. MySQL, Firebird, and Postgres are
different for reasons of philosophy, history, and operations. Firebird,
for example, grew up on 68020s, and has also been transactional. MySQL
grew out of an ISAM and won’t have native transactional support for
another couple of week. Postgres started open source as dumpware from
an abandoned research project and mutated into useful system. The
designers of these systems had different ideas of how application
programs should work (and, to a large degree, still do). MySQL, to
makes things more confusing, supports an opened ended set of storage
engines of radically different designs, so even doing a comparison of
MySQL to itself is a daunting project.

Postgres, and to a lessor degree MySQL, are rapidly moving targets, so
the shelf life of a comparison would be distressingly short,
particularly given the amount of work involved.

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