Re: Postgres vs Firebird? - Mailing list pgsql-general

A few additional caveats about trying to support both PostgreSQL and
Firebird:

1)  I was unable to find a large text field type (equivalent to
varchar() or TEXT) in Firebird.  All Varchar fields require a length
specifyer.
2)  I found stored procedures to be a serious pain in Firebird.
3)  PostgreSQL like most RDBMS's stores column names lower case.
Firebird stores them in upper case.
4) No variable length arrays either in Firebird.

In general, I don't recommend porting from PostgreSQL to Firebird unless
you have to.  Unfortunately I have had to do this on a few occasions.
It has never been pleasent.  These are however caveats and are not
insurmountable.

However, I would choose Firebird anyday for larger Windows
installations, and it is quite a bit better than MySQL...

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Tony Caduto wrote:

> Hi,
> We have a big project here that we originaly did in Firebird 1.0, it
> worked well, though was missing tons
> of features like built in functions, temp tables etc etc. We then
> updated to Firebird 1.5 and again it worked good.
> We always had issues with the stupid Firbird OAT  (oldest active
> transaction), if the OAT gets stuck your database will start
> to get huge as transaction data is stored in the database file itself.
> Firebird does not have the concept of
> a tranasction log (at lease a seperate one)
> The only way to compact a Firebird DB is to do a backup and restore,
> and we had lots of issues with this when the OAT
> got stuck.  You have to constantly monitor the OAT and the OIT (oldest
> interesting transaction)
> Anyway soon after our update to FB 1.5 I started playing around with
> Postgres 7.2 or 7.3 and man was I impressed.
> I could do temp tables had tons of built in functions, there was no
> weird SQL dialects(firebird has 3 SQL dialects)
> I could just use any SQL i wanted from functions(firebird has several
> types of SQL PSQL,DSQL etc and you can't use one from
> the other.
> Firebird does not have a freely available replication system or a GUI
> admin tool(there are third party ones available)
>
> I can tell you from experience Postgresql 8.x is WAY BETTER than
> Firebird.
>
>
>
> 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)
>> -Ben
>
>