Location: Ludbreg, Croatia.
Business sector:
website: ` <http://>`_
Description
Magic Partner is one of the six companies in the Magic group. Five of them are production type companies, while Magic Partner is a service provider. Magic Partner is divided into several sectors where each sector provides a different service for other companies. Our sector does software development and have recently finished developing production managment software (piXio 2) which is now used by several other companies.
Usage of Firebird
piXio 2 runs using a FireBird 1.5 classic server. We have been testing classic on Windows 2000 Server and it works very well, so we decided to use classic server instead of superserver. There are some problems with administration of user rights, but we've found a way around those problems.
We have one powerful server running six databases. Each of the databases is about 100Mb in size (growing every day). There are about 60 client computers from which about 30 are working concurerrently at least 8 hours every day.
Why we use Firebird
It is not complicated and huge, in fact it is fast, reliable and it's free! We originally started with InterBase 6.0, and then moved immediately to Firebird, so we have been using Firebird from the beginning. We were then writing simple programs which other companies in Magic group needed. At that time, we needed a fast, reliable and unexpensive database. Originally InterBase 6.0 (Open Source) was perfect. We had a lot of problems in the beginning, but as time passed and InterBase Open Source became Firebird things have got better every day.
With version 1.5 things are really great. We miss fine grained SMP support currently, but we expect to see that implemnted soon.
We decided to use the Classic server because of the heavy usage we make of the database and in our application, sometimes one user can perform an operation that can take a long time to complete. Under the current Superserver architecture that would have the effect of potentially blocking the server for a period of time. Using Classic, all the other users can work without experiencing any performance degredation. Although the services API isn't yet completely functional on the classic server currently, we have managed to work around it, but this is a minor issue compared to everything else we got.