[fpc-other] Firebird vs PostgreSQL

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

On 26/10/17 11:00, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> In our previous episode, Santiago A. said:> That's my point. Why Firebird is not more popular?> > Once I read two point about Firebird lack of popularity:> * In early days, firebird documentation was almost inexistent, there> were a few .txt with new features but you had to rely on Interbase 6.0> docs, that weren't very good either. So it looked like an almost> abandoned software maintained by a few fans.> * It had no administration tool, you had (and you still have) to rely on> third part tools. I think flamerobin is the administration tool "de facto"
> * it was x86 only for a long time.
> Which is why I ended up with postgresql, having powerpc and later armservers.

One further point if I may. PostgreSQL and Firebird both have the 
capability of sending asynchronous notifications to clients, i.e. along 
the lines of "somebody's changed this table, everybody needs to check 
it". When I last looked, they were the only free databases that did 
this, although in the case of something strictly single-user like SQLite 
the facility isn't really needed.

Provided that you're not getting into things like creating new users on 
the fly, the SQL dialects are sufficiently similar that a client program 
can talk to either without substantial modification. I think that a 
reasonable approach is to select Postgres for departmental or larger 
storage, or Firebird for something that's strictly local.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]