Re: troll

> Have you looked at firebird?

I haven't worked with firebird yet, but everyone that I've met who has really seems to like it. Must be something to that. Firebird and Postgresql seem to be the two worthwhile opensource & free options. There's certainly room for two good products here. Especially since MySQL and MAXDB are neither free, nor very good (aside from marketing).

> Firebird (ex Interbase), my favourite toy db, can quite happily
> run 300GB db's with 100's of concurrent users.

Sure, but the most common database of this size would be a data warehouse/data mart used for business intelligence. And the queries typically used in this type of application are table scans. Informix/db2/oracle can rely on partitioning to avoid scanning entire tables, split the work across cpus via parallelism, manage the joins in the fastest manner due to robust optimizers that understand start schemas, and even rewrite the sql to use summary tables when possible.

The net result is that one of these huge databases can run the 300 gb database on tiny hardware, whereas an tiny opensource database would require a huge piece of hardware to get the same results.

I'm sure that this won't be the case forever, but until the open source databases get some of these features and capabilities they'll never compete well with their commercial alternatives in the 100+ gbyte range.

That's why I'm assuming that db2/oracle/informix have about 5-10 years. Received on Sat Jul 30 2005 - 09:02:50 CDT