Hi,
I am a MySQL admin. I like it very much. It is very quick,stable and easy in configuration. But I have a boss, who has been told about InterBase. He told me I should interest in the InterBase, because it is programmed by russian, who made a great project and told him mysql is totaly worse in comparison with the InterBase. Actually he didn't prooved it, he just heared about it from the russians. Did anyone met with the InterBase and can tel me something about it and prove me that the Mysql is BETTER? I need arguments for using the MySQL for a company (lets tell about 100 people, who use it very intensive through the whole day 7 days a week).
Best regards,
Maciej Bobrowski
Maciej,
I should point out that "Interbase" is not free. It is still being sold by Borland. Firebird, is the open source version and can be distributed for free. The two products branched off a couple of years ago. I've used all 3 products including MySQL.
Interbase/Firebird has a couple of drawbacks to MySQL. The database server uses a lot more CPU than MySQL so it won't support heavy loads as well as MySQL. You'll see significant CPU differences after only 5 connected users. This is because Interbase/Firebird is considerably more complicated database than MySQL. It's referential integrity, triggers, transactions and other goodies will make a lot more work for the database server. Interbase/Firebird also uses transactions for all updates which on the surface sounds fine, but when new updates are written to the table, the old rows are still present in the table (archived but not visible). This makes rolling back a transaction extremely fast because it just decrements the current transaction level to re-activate the old rows. But this means after the transaction has been committed, the database has to be routinely swept to remove the older rows otherwise the database slows down after a while. You can easily have IB/FB automatically sweep the database after 'x' transactions. But users with large databases > 100MB find that even with sweeping, their database will slow down after a while. The only way to get it back up to speed is to unload all of the data and reload the database, which is extremely time consuming for very large databases. You also have to take the database offline to do this.
Interbase is excellent if you do not have a large number of connected users (< 50) or database with more than 100MB in size. If you do, it will take a lot of tweaking to get it to run fast. The upper limit for the max # of connected users was 254 (it's probably more than that now) and if you need to get more, then middleware is recommended. The problem with middleware like Midas/DataSnap costs money for each installed server. In the past there have been corruption problems with large databases but that problem is 3 years ago and may have been fixed (check the newsgroups to be sure). Also the earlier IB/FB did not support SMP very well. In fact, adding a second processor would actually slow the server down. This may have been fixed with the latest release of IB, but I don't know about FB. IB/FB is not going to be as fast as MySQL for most queries, it has far too much overhead.
Summing up, IB is a very robust database when it comes to relational integrity and transactions. Unfortunately you're not going to see many people using it in a 24/7 operation like on a webserver, unless the database is small or readonly. It needs routine maintenance for it to run optimally. It is a lot like buying a Ferrari, you really need to buy 2, one for you and the other for your mechanic.<g> IB is best suited for commercial/vertical market applications where it is not running 24/7 and where you're not handling gigabytes of data.
You may want to check out the Interbase (commerical product) news group at borland.public.interbase.general for more info or http://www.ibphoenix.com/ , http://www.interbase-world.com/ or http://firebird.sourceforge.net/.
I hope this helps.
Mike
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