Location: Odense, Denmark.
Business sector: Developing POS system for use in the Retail Sector.
website: www.microcom.dk
Description
We are located in the third biggest town in Denmark. We have a total of 14 employees which includes 3 programmers, 2 support staff, 3 salesmen among others. We have several servers on our LAN (running everything from Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Linux) and some 30+ clients. We have installed Microsoft Windows Terminal Server and Citrix Server to make it possible to access our network from home.
Usage of Firebird
We have developed a POS application (which actually is 3 separate programs). We started developing against InterBase, but switched shortly after to Firebird. The size of the DB varies from 5 MB to 4 GB.
We have customers who use our POS system on a stand-alone system (one machine running some Windows version, Firebird and our POS Application) and we have client server based solutions.
We also have solutions that use either Windows Terminal Server or Citrix Server to gain access to the database. One of our customers has a Server running Windows 2000, 1 Gb Memory, Pentium III 1000 Mhz, SCSI in raid 5 on a 100 MBit LAN. From inside the house some 15+ clients connect to this, and from outside via Windows Terminal Server some 25+ other clients connect. They have some 5000+ transactions a day. We are currently starting to host databases as well, where the customer can connect using Citrix Clients. We have some 16+ customers so far.
The slowest machine in use is a Windows 98Se, 256 Mb RAM, Pentium III 800 Mhz running a stand alone system.
Why we use Firebird
We started out by using IBX components with Delphi 5 against InterBase 6.01 (the Open Source version). When Borland announced that the next version of InterBase was going to cost money we started to look for something else. We found Firebird.
At this point our applications use either IBO or IBX to connect to the Firebird Database.
We were looking for a database which was fast, reliable, stable, low-cost, and came with the client server part as well as transactions. Firebird had it all. In the 3 years we have been using Firebird we have only had 3 database corruptions which could not be explained by hardware failure etc. However all could be solved by a Backup and Restore.