[DUG] Why InterBase

[kurt]

Richard Vowles wrote:
> This is a test that the IB guys used to do with customers when Borland
> actually made an attempt to sell IB (such as to Boeing and the US Army -
> both of which they succeeded in doing). 1) Have an application actively
> updating the database 2) pull the plug 3) put the power back on and
> start it up. How long does SQL Server take to start? IB has no restart
> time - it is up and ready to go immediately. 

You might want to check that still works : a lot of
drives now have write-caching that is hard to turn
off (is it even possible in 2k/XP?). Makes good stats:
performance of a single IDE will match raided SCSI drives,
but screws the db under power failure.

> 
>>Having used both IB & MSSQL my choice would be PostgreSQL..
> 
> Have you used Postgres? I used it once and wasn't so impressed from an
> operations standpoint (backup and restore seemed unnecessarily weird
> operations). I haven't used it in development.

Rocks. Backup & restore are *easy* with 'cron' and 'tar' and 'gzip'.
(we had a live backup that never got used, but under a failure,
we could've cut straight to last nights backup without a restore.
All (apart from pointing at the backup) automated : backup, archive, 
ship, restore). Very fast for restoring a single table too.

> I'm now happy to have this discussion when I wouldn't have bothered
> before. InterBase is a core product of DevCo going forward so I need to
> know what are its selling points and what aren't. And I intend to have
> an InterBase partner programme that rocks.

Doesn't seem it'd be too hard too find a market for it - IB is
an ideal size/price/performer for the current web-size dbs.
(if I were you I'd promote FB too, so's users can buy support
contracts for IB when they grow :)


Cheers, Kurt.