1) I was unable to find a large text field type (equivalent to varchar() or TEXT) in Firebird. All Varchar fields require a length specifyer.
2) I found stored procedures to be a serious pain in Firebird.
3) PostgreSQL like most RDBMS's stores column names lower case. Firebird stores them in upper case.
4) No variable length arrays either in Firebird.
In general, I don't recommend porting from PostgreSQL to Firebird unless you have to. Unfortunately I have had to do this on a few occasions. It has never been pleasent. These are however caveats and are not insurmountable.
However, I would choose Firebird anyday for larger Windows installations, and it is quite a bit better than MySQL...
Best Wishes, Chris Travers Metatron Technology Consulting
Tony Caduto wrote:
Hi,
We have a big project here that we originaly did in Firebird 1.0, it worked well, though was missing tons
of features like built in functions, temp tables etc etc. We then updated to Firebird 1.5 and again it worked good.
We always had issues with the stupid Firbird OAT (oldest active transaction), if the OAT gets stuck your database will start
to get huge as transaction data is stored in the database file itself. Firebird does not have the concept of
a tranasction log (at lease a seperate one)
The only way to compact a Firebird DB is to do a backup and restore, and we had lots of issues with this when the OAT
got stuck. You have to constantly monitor the OAT and the OIT (oldest interesting transaction)
Anyway soon after our update to FB 1.5 I started playing around with Postgres 7.2 or 7.3 and man was I impressed.
I could do temp tables had tons of built in functions, there was no weird SQL dialects(firebird has 3 SQL dialects)
I could just use any SQL i wanted from functions(firebird has several types of SQL PSQL,DSQL etc and you can't use one from
the other.
Firebird does not have a freely available replication system or a GUI admin tool(there are third party ones available)
I can tell you from experience Postgresql 8.x is WAY BETTER than Firebird.
Benjamin Smith wrote:
As a long-time user of Postgres, (First started using it at 7.0) I'm reading recently that Firebird has been taking off as a database.
Perhaps this is not the best place to ask this, but is there any compelling advantage to using Firebird over Postgres? We have a large database (almost 100 tables of highly normalized data) heavily loaded with foreign keys and other constraints, and our application makes heavy use of transactions.
I say this as my company's growth has been exponential, showing no sign of letting up soon, and I'm reviewing clustering and replication technologies so that we can continue to scale as nicely as we have to date with our single server. (now with a load avg around .30 typically)
-Ben
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