[lug] Doing your own transactions

[John Karns]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Michael J. Pedersen uttered:

> Well, short review of it, from many years ago (around interbase 4):
> 
> I liked it. A lot. Stored Procedures, Triggers. foreign keys (which I used
> badly, as I've since discovered), and all the other features which you'd
> expect from an RDBMS. Quite full featured, quite nice, quite worth using.

Also there is something called ACS (ArsDigita Community System) from
ArsDigita (http://www.arsdigita.com) which rather like a tcl based cgi
kind of thing.  Although commonly used with the AOLServer web server
(now also open source) and Oracle, there are versions for the Apache
server and ibase and Postgres.  They offer many pre-built modules 

Have any thoughts on a comparison to Postgres?  

I understand that ibase evolved from a versioning system engine, and thus
records are somehow stored differentially, if that's the right term.  
IOW, for two records with similar content, rather than duplicating data,
differences are stored.  This would of course save on disk space and tend
to shrink the size of the DB which would tend to improve efficiency
concerning disk access.  But it would also seem that there would be some
penalty to reconstruct a record from it's component parts.  I'm curious
about what net effect this would have on performance: in context of a
large DB with a significant amount of patterned data vs a large DB with
more randomized data.

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John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net