Firebird scales very well!

Firebird is the best of the rest (open source RDBMS)!

I think Larry Ellison is Hitler reincarnated... that's the only reason I don't like/use Oracle.

Heh. Be that as it may, the up-side to Oracle is that there's a tremendous amount of functionality that comes built-in with the database, such as all the DBMS_* packages. There's a lot of stuff Oracle provides for free that you pay for with other databases. That, and it uses MVCC, which means you have to spend far less time worrying about locks. Granted, this is less of an issue today than it was a few years ago.

I think that you should take a look at FYRACLE ;-)

http://www.janus-software.com/fb_fyracle.html
and
http://www.fyracle.org

Then come back and tell us what do you think!

I fail to see how that addresses any of my points about Oracle. There are only 2 reason why I'd use Oracle: 1) if I knew I needed to scale to a truely massive database and 2) if I'd be able to use all the built-in functionality to develop an application faster or cheaper.

Take a look at the documentation for the DBMS packages as a starter; there's a tremendous amount of capability Oracle gives you right out of the box. Filesystem operations, email, and job scheduling, just to name a few.

Don't get me wrong, OSS databases like PostgreSQL and Firebird are great, but they still have a ways to go to match something like Oracle.

Of course the story will be rather different a year or two from now...

I fail to see how any of your points proves Larry Ellison isn't Hitler reincarnated. hehe

I agree, and I know that I don't need anything Oracle-size any time soon ;-)
Firebird is all I need!
And we will se in a few years what will happen...

Crito,

No reason to evoke Godwin's Law here. Please refrain in the future. Thanks.

--jeremy

otay, sorry it'll never happen again (here anyway.)

Just for the sake of taking two perspectives, I just want to mention that the reaon why there are primarily two types of posts here (high-end/standard compliant DB versus MySQL users) is likely the same why there is Windows on one side and Unix/Linux/all the rest. This is, of course, open to interpretation and not inherently negative. Let's be happy MySQL is out there, otherwise, what would the first category do? (And don't tell me they'd go for a 'REAL' DB). Reading this list, there are awfully many similarities between standard arguments for Windows as there are for MySQL. e.g. simplicity of use, getting going fast, a certain type of robustness (some people may prefer to evaluate 5/0 as NULL or insert Feb 31st as a valid date), and an eternal discussion whether something is a feature or a bug. As usual with a piece of software, the question is always what one needs to do, which is probably quite obvious to most developers.

Application lifecycle when scalability and security are left up to developers and "waterfall" project managers:

1) move into production after "user acceptance" testing but no alpha or beta or even a load test.
2) when performance problems initially arise throw more hardware at the problem
3) when hardware yields poor bang-per-buck throw expensive experts/consultants at the problem
4) when experts/consultants do what little they can and leave, come to realization that entire app has to be re-written from scratch and moved to another platform

And that's why 70%+ of development projects fail long-term, IMVHO.

Quite disappointing results, if you ask me.

unacceptable!

In what regard, out of curiosity?

--jeremy