We went with Firebird 2.0 because

Quote from firebird-general

Yes. We were evaluating various embedded engines a few years ago,
including Firebird, MSSQL XP, Oracle XP, DB2 XP, MySQL, SQL Lite, MS
Access and PostgreSQL. In addition to standard SQL capabilities, our
application required us to be able to mimic the behaviour of other
database engines we support fairly closely.

We went with Firebird 2.0 because:

- Smallest footprint.
- File based databases.
- Lack of size restrictions.
- Friendly license terms.
- Extensive set of data types (with domains to handle anything
funky we run into later)
- Extensive set of collations
- Extensibility
- Active and responsive development community
- Easy installation.
- Easy configuration
- Standards compliance

Limitations we ran into:

- Database files must be local
- Collations are all case sensitive ( we may be able to deal with
this in 2.1, but my 2.0 attempts all failed)
- No built in functions to speak of required a third party UDF
library (this has changed in 2.1)
- No session scoped (i.e. local) temporary tables (global temps are
in 2.1 but not local)
- Different instances of the application cannot both access the
same database file.

The limitations were fairly minor and easy to work around. In
general we are extremely happy with our choice!

Incidentally, our reasons for rejecting MS-SQL XP were:

- Forces our users to install .NET (this was the big show stopper)
- Relatively largish footprint (60Mb if memory serves)
- 2GB database size restriction (this made us nervous as we have no
control over the user's data)
- Missing data types (DATE, TIME)

HTH,
________________________________________________________
Richard Wesley Senior Software Developer Tableau
Software
Visit: http://www.trytableau.com/now.html

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