At 06:24 PM 10/11/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>Why would you use mySQL over Postgresl? They're both free, but Postgresql
>has a
>JDBC driver that's XA-compliant. Also, mySQL is known to blow away your whole
>database if it has a bad crash, whereas Postgresql is better at persisting
>data
>through a bad crash.
>
>How does Interbase 6 compare to Postgresql? Is it free?
Interbase is now free. It used to be a commercial Database sold by
Inprise/Borland. Because this is the first opensource release, not all the
new features for IB6 are fully available for ODBC and JDBC yet. I've
worked with the JDBC drivers, and I have no complaints. Drivers that
support all the new features are in the works (ODBC drivers are in beta,
JDBC drivers are still in development).
Interbase does support transactions and blobs. Most current users of
Interbase are from Borland Delphi and C++ Builder camps.
There's a company out of South Africa that's offering a replication engine
that might be useful for people trying to set up a failover-capable
system. (Don't have any details on hand... sorry)
As far as speed goes, I don't know how it compares to postgresql. Mers,
inc. has an online full-text search setup of all the Inprise newsgroups
made from their own commercial extensions to interbase. Its pretty
snappy. It exists on http://www.mers.com/
And finally, for windows users, there's a very nice management console that
you can use to locally or remotely administer your database. (The database
itself doesn't have to reside on windows)
I think that's about all I can say about it. The biggest problem it has
right now is that the multi-threaded server version doesn't scale well with
multiple processors. Of course, since its open source, we don't have to
wait until Borland releases a new version a year down the road to get that
feature fully going. :-)
Hope this clarifies information on it!
-Mike
