Month: September 2009

I work for a small company (fewer than 10 employees). We want to upgrade our primary server hardware this year.

Current server is a HP ML330 G3 with a single Xeon @ 2.8 Ghz, 3GB ram, Raid5 consisting of three 15krpm Ultra320 SCSI drives. OS is Windows 2000 Server.

Our current CPU features hyperthreading, which is enabled. The motherboard is a dual socket board, so initially I was shopping for a second identical CPU (because they’re as cheap as $15 on eBay). But after running some tests, I don’t think it would benefit us.

Our ERP software uses Interbase version 5.6, which does not appear to be multi-threaded based on my tests. I contacted the developer of our ERP package, and they confirmed this: Interbase will NOT utilize multiple physical or logical CPUs. More recent revisions of our ERP software have switched to Firebird db server, which I’ve learned is not multi-thread aware either. This sounds terribly old-fashioned, since modern CPUs are trending toward higher core-count.

Read full post and make your suggestions here.

Based on numerous inquiries and wishes of our readers (dbsvet.cz), we decided to organize a one day dedicated to the Firebird database platform, which spells out why the Firebird is a good alternative for the development of new database applications.

One-day course about Firebird led by leading Czech expert (Jiri Cinkura) on this issue introduces the basic database features Firebird so that each of the participants recognized the advantages and disadvantages of this platform for developing real applications and testimonials.