Microsoft SQL Server

Firebird

Any version of Microsoft SQL server from version 2000 or newer.  This includes lightweight versions such as MSDE or SQL Express 2005.  Versions older than 2000 (i.e. SQL server 7 are not supported)

Firebird is a free open source database server.  We looked long and hard at many different alternatives to support in addition to Microsoft SQL server and tested many out thoroughly.

Pros:

Pros:

Very powerful, can be scaled from a small network using one of the free versions up to an enterprise class solution involving clusters of SQL servers capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.

Very powerful, in testing we have found in most cases Firebird is only slightly slower than SQL server 2000 with all hardware being equal.  However much depends on the exact operation being performed.

Free for the “light” version such as SQL Express 2005 or the older MSDE it replaces

Requires little to no administration, once set up it just keeps working

Light versions can be replaced with the full blown server editions as required

Free with a very solid history in production use.

Has a very active community of developers

Can be backed up while running with included utilities

Can be run on a non Windows computer such as Linux saving the cost of an operating system for a computer being used solely as a database server.

Just as reliable as Microsoft SQL server in our experience, we have had no issues with either platform.

Cons:

Cons:

The free light versions such as SQL Express 2005 may be too limited for some offices depending on the amount of data and how heavily AyaNova is used.  10 users or less will find performance good, as you go over that and add more and more data you may find performance decreasing as the light versions of SQL server have a built in throttling mechanism to limit their use to lighter loads.

Slightly slower under heavy loads:   If for example, you were to display a huge list of thousands of records of data in AyaNova rather than filtering it by a date range as is recommended we have found Microsoft SQL server to be noticeably faster.  On the other hand when doing normal work in AyaNova entering work orders, printing them etc there is no significant difference.

Full SQL server can be relatively pricey.

It’s open source free software, for some that is a bonus, others may find that worrisome.  We’re not normally great proponents of free software for obvious reasons, but we did look at both commercial and open source alternatives to offer with MS-SQL server and it was technically the best match for the requirements of AyaNova.

Different versions of the latest Microsoft SQL server 2005 can be compared at: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx

You can find more information about Firebird at: http://www.firebirdsql.org/