At 01:59 PM 12/14/2003, you wrote:
>Hello.
>
>I have been tasked with evaluating open source databases for a large
>upcoming project: e-commerce, B2B, high availability.
>
>The O/S is most likely to be Linux, although FreeBSD could possibly be used
>(lower probability).
>
>So far, it seems that MySQL, MaxDB, PostgreSQL, and Interbase/Firebird are
>possible candidates.
>
>Does anyone know why we should or should not use any of these? Does anyone
>know of other possibilities?
>
>I'd very much appreciate hearing your comments and recommendations.
>
>I have only recently started these evaluations. BTW, my own background is
>from the Oracle DBA world.
>
>MySQL is certainly popular and seems to have very good performance, but I am
>concerned that the lack of Triggers, Stored Procedures, User-Defined
>Functions, and Views (to a lesser degree ) will be a disadvantage.
>
>MaxDB "appears" to be more feature-rich and possibly more
>industrial-strength. How does its performance and stability compare to the
>others?
>
>Many Thanks.
>Jerry Apfelbaum
>Toronto
Jerry,
Interbase/Firebird looks good on paper. But there are a couple of
things to watch out for.
1) Check the Borland Interbase newsgroups for "corruption" to see if it is
still an issue. I know from reading their newsgroups a few years back ,
there were quite a few postings. It could of been due to inadequate
hardware or some external source like a misconfigured server or power
failure. There are many sites that use IB without such problems but it is
worth checking it out (especially how to successfully repair a damaged
IB/FB database because all the tables are stored in one file).
2) Speed problems. I don't know how much data your tables will have, but
IB/FB has a habit of slowing down as more rows are added/deleted. They have
an automated Sweep process that cleans out the updated/deleted rows
(deleted & updated rows still take up space until the database is swept).
Even so a large db will still slow down. I suspect the problem is due to
unbalanced indexes. The only way to fix it is to unload all your data and
reload it back in. Some people do it once a week.
3) The server CPU load will increase rapidly after the first 5 or 6 users.
In other words IB/FB requires a much faster CPU than the same number of
users for MySQL. It is a very CPU intensive DB server. There was an earlier
problem with IB Super Server not running well on multiple processors (it
actually slowed things down). I believe this has been fixed in IB version
6.5. I don't know if this was fixed in FB because FB may be running IB
Classic (single processor) version.
Mike
