NewsForge: Firebird Targets the Enterprise Database

“Last fall Allan Grant was very upset following a meeting with
his database vendor. Grant is the CIO of a large trading group with
over $1 billion in sales. The database vendor had just completed a
license audit and had concluded that the maximum allowed number of
concurrent users had been exceeded by one for a three-minute
interval during the week-long audit. Also the vendor had concluded
that Grant’s setup should henceforth be regarded as a
‘multiplexing’ setup, even though it had not changed since the
previous audit. To overcome both issues the vendor was proposing a
new licensing agreement which would more than quadruple the total
license cost.

“A few years ago, Grant would have had little choice but to
defer to the practices of his current vendor. Today he has an
alternative, in the form of open source database systems. MySQL,
well-known as a database for serving Web pages, has set out a
roadmap that will bring enterprise features to the product during
the next few years…”

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