Would you shoot an ant with a bazooka?

    Suppose you are given an UZI, a bazooka or a rifle to kill elephants. Personally, I don't appreciate armament and I do care about animals, but this is only an example. Now, you are giving the mission of discovering an ant and shooting it. Don't you think your equipment would be overkill?

Back to the IT world: your client needs a true relational data for her needs. She doesn't want to waste megabucks in HW and SW and she doesn't want to pay for a dedicated, full time DB administrator. There are 40 users and the concurrency is high. Volatility rate is high, too, so you want to keep locking issues as low as possible. And you don't want to waste 3 weeks to install the product nor call specialized tech support to do the job. As if this doesn't suffice, your client says some of her employees use a notebook with a snapshot of the database they copy from the main server two times a week for browsing purposes.

What do you do? Do you call immediately one of the VARS of the hugest and more expensive engines to get support and start designing? Why don't you give IB a try for a fraction of the price? No other commercial product can help you more with conflicts among readers and writers. And you can use LIBS with your mobile clients. Currently, IB has replication through a third party generic product but if you wait some months, you can see native replication in the engine. Ask some current IB customers and they will tell you the administrative tasks do not consume great time, so perhaps one of the reasons IB has not very complicated administration utilities is because it doesn't need them. And you can get several third party products, some shareware, others definitely freeware, aimed specifically to Interbase.

Therefore, next time your application is mainly for OLTP and you need a good but not necessarily the best performance with a full fledged RDBMS, consider Interbase among your options. Perhaps the only product that can match Interbase in the embedded market is Sybase SQL Anywhere, but only Interbase is a multi version, non blocking engine by original design.

This page was last updated on 2001-01-13 01:17:28