For what it is worth here are reasons what IB will lose the battle in the
long term
1/ History repeats - MS is doing to IB what it did to DBase and Paradox when
it released the $100 database Access 1.0 - it was garbage but stopped those
products dominance.
2/ Who said MSDE is limited to 5 users - it isn't. I can see it being
installed in quite large sites based on the fact that I have seen 30 user
Win 3.11 sites networked running Database Apps (unreliably of course!)
3/ IB can't look to Linux as there are 'free' SQL Databases for Linux
already. If you were to follow the development of Postgress it is impressive
and at this rate will outstrip both MSSQL and IB within a year.
4/ Borland's tactical error was to subtly try and use Delphi to prop up
Paradox (hence the extended support for Paradox in TDataSet) and I feel the
BDE has been a millstone, Imprise don't really support it because its free
and it is almost totally unnecesary with an SQL Back end. I said recently in
this group that Delhi didn't direct you anywhere in the db field..what I
meant was that by supporting everything they have not declared a preferred
direction and hence deveopers out there have flocked to Access/Jet. We may
declare in this group our technical superiority but this does not reflect in
installed sites. Imprise should have shipped a thin (non BDE) TibQuery and
TibStoredProc with Delphi Pro (or a higher product between Pro and C/S) and
allowed free distrib of LocalIB with it. This way a Delphi Developer would
be 'directed' toward a technically superior front end and back end.
5/ IB is a great embedded DBMS but as a server for small systems (1-5
users ) I have found it quite cumbersome - the main reason being that to
alter metadata can be frustrating due to its extraneous dependency checking
and this was not helped by the Visigenic ODBC drivers.
IB is not the only product in this position - SQL Anywhere, Centura,
Scalable will also find business difficult in the medium term as new
developers don't taget their products
I hope this doesn't cause a riot it is only an opinion but since i do a lot
of one-of developments I'll be using Delphi 5, ADOExpress and MSDE for the
above reasons
Regards Neven
N.K. MacEwan B.E. E&E
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