Location: United Kingdom.
Business sector: Software Design, Development and Consultancy/Server Management/Developer Web Hosting.
website: www.tectsoft.net
Description
TECT Software Ltd specialises in Software Design and Development and provides fast reliable web hosting for developers.
Usage of Firebird
As well as providing web hosting based around Firebird 1.5, we also use Firebird as the backend database for our server tools. Automated Server Monitor 2 (http://asm.tectsoft.net/) uses Firebird 1.5 to store data about the servers that it is monitoring. The monitoring is done using native Win32 NT Services and Remote Agents, the GUI is built using a .net/C# web application which allows administators to remotely administer and monitor servers.
Why we use Firebird
Firebird was chosen for several reasons:
- Low maintenance, Firebird doesn't need a DBA to be on site monitoring the database for performance, this reduces labour costs and overheads for our customers.
- Backups, being able to take realtime backups whilst the database is still logging server activity is a must, we can schedule backups as little or as often as required safe in the knowledge that Automated Server Monitor will still be able to monitor a servers activity.
- Multiuser, we needed to be able to support between 2 and 1000 simultaneous user connections, each being able to update, maintain and present data to users.
- Connectivity, we deploy agents to monitor servers, these need to be able to communicate with the control server using TCP/IP.
- Events, changes to the configuration are instantly relayed to Services/Agents without the need to constantly poll the database for changes.
- Speed, a typical installation would see Automated Server Monitor use approximately 50000 transactions a day (from multiple users), being able to update/insert data in near realtime is crucial to how Automated Server Monitor works. The database can expand between 300kb and 10MB per day depending on configuration so support for large files was a must.
Having used InterBase since 1997 we found that with the release of Firebird we are able to offer our customers effective solutions built around a true ANSI standard RDBMS without the need to purchase expensive licenses, the community spirit that surrounds Firebird and the Foundation which supports it allowed us to choose Firebird with complete confidence.