thecrazyhostingpartner

he says that MySQL is unreliable and crashes.

Absurd if configured correctly.

Well this is the “Crazy Hosting Partner”. Absurd Samboll? Absurd as in, “deserving of and inspiring ridicule and an unreasonable position”?

Okay. I will respond to your flame.

MySQL is for <i>children</i>. Well that is too harsh. It is when the project does not require any real assurances of data integrity and that <i>failure is an option</i>.

Well I live in the business world where you cannot just be a “tech guy” or an “IT guy”. You also have to make decisions based on other criteria. We have databases that are responsible for credit card transactions, medical records, financial data.

Regardless of how configured, MySQL has been historically unreliable and prone to crashes and data losses. Just about every website/forum/blog/service that I have been signed up that relies on MySQL has events <i><b>WHERE ENTIRE DAYS, WEEKS, AND MONTHS</i></b> of data has been lost.

To deny this, is to deny reality itself. It’s all I ever hear about is how MySQL has corrupted, crashed, and lost member data.

Well I don’t run a little website or a blog. I am in the business of running serious services for clients and I cannot accept the eventuality of MySQL screwing up my relationship with said clients.

Only recently, has MySQL even started offering transactional services in the first place. Firebird/Interbase/MS SQL/Oracle are FAR MORE PROVEN PLATFORMS to host customer databases. <i>This is not bragging, or empty vapid statements from a Firebird fanboy.</i> I am purely relying on my own experience and that of many other people around the world.

Obviously I am strongly against MySQL, I would hope that rational people realize that there are strong business reasons to demand certain levels of reliability from their infrastructures. Since I have heard of far too many websites and businesses suffering horrific losses of data, unacceptable downtime, etc. that MySQL just cannot be seriously considered as an option.

So Samboll, I must say I take some offense by simply labeling my position as <i>absurd</i>.

As for the ability to connect WordPress to Firebird, it is entirely possible to do so.

The php code itself can be modified to use Firebird libraries instead of MySQL. That, in of itself, is fairly trivial. We have php classes that were written (by my partner) that offer a very robust data abstraction layer for Firebird in php.

The vast majority of the SQL functions and statements are entirely compatible with Firebird. That is why the word “standard” is in the name. There are a few reserved keywords that need to be changed, but that is also fairly trivial.

What is non-trivial is the InsertID feature of MySQL. There is nothing similar in Firebird and it needs to be created by hand. This is not impossible, but does require some sophisticated understanding of how Firebird works at a low-level.

I am seriously considering that once we have WordPress properly working on Firebird and tested, that we will throw it up on Sourceforge or release the modified code.