this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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SQL - any and all

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For discussion about SQL and databases. All versions welcome.

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Your favorite database engine? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Obviously Microsoft Access is the best but it would be cool to hear your opinion.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Unpopular opinion probably, but Firebird has been really good to us for a couple of decades. We have thousands of users running it to provide offline data and it's been extremely reliable and trouble-free. Good support for features like stored procedures, triggers, etc. without requiring much in the way of maintenance.

My biggest complaints are that the database file size tends to bloat up with lots of transactions, and it needs a better bulk-load feature (it has an 'external table' feature that works well and that we use heavily, but it's kind of a pain). And prior to v4 it didn't have a good replication system. No idea how good the replication in v4 is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just curious, why would anyone use such a fringe technology? Is there any feature that other FLOSS db engines miss?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In our case, history mostly. The application we are using with it was originally developed (not by me) in the late 1980s in Borland Pascal and, I think, dBase. At some point in the early 1990s the original developers decided that dBase wasn't good enough and because Borland owned Interbase at that time and supported it with their coding tools, they decided to move to Interbase (later when Firebird was forked from Interbase they switched over to Firebird to avoid potentially needing to pay licensing fees on the numerous client computers).

The application, hugely expanded compared to what it was in the early days, has a great deal of Firebird-related code in it now, so moving off of it would be expensive and not really provide any return on the investment.