Firebird for cloud application?

Question

I will start a POS (point of sale) system that will begin as a regular intranet system (in his initial-beta stage) but I want to scale later to a cloud offering. I will offer it as a hybrid solution.

I want it to use firebird, because the easier deployment, minimal footprint and the ability to use a embedded multithread server. However, I worry if firebird could be used for a cloud service with fault-tolerance, data replication, etc... to be reliable enough to small companies put his business on it (similar to the service of freshbooks).

My other option is use Postgress, but I have not experience with it.

Is FB good enough to be use as SAAS backend? Any successfully implementation?

P.D: I thinking on deploy it on GoGrid or Rackspace...

Answer 1

FB is a great option and it can handle large data sets and has the ability to span a db across multiple files . I've been using it in a couple of web projects most recently on inmobiapp.com. But the one thing I see lacking is replication, so far the only solution I've used is called ibpreplicator it's a very good rep. tool if configured properly. You can try it for free but you have to buy a license.

Also consider driver support for the programming language you will use. Last time I checked FB on Rails support is not that good on the other hand PHP has great support for FB.

Answer 2

You should code your POS application without any knowledge of the SQL backend. That way you can switch backends at any time. It's also advantageous that application code not understand the innards of the persistence code, otherwise you have a layer violation.

A common way to do this is to use an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) library. This Firebird FAQ recommends some ORMs that work with Firebird.