Embedded Firebird as back-end db in asp.net web sites

Question

I am a big fan of Firebird DB, I am using it since 1.5.0 version, but I am curious why FB is not that much popular as web sites back-end DB. I would like to use embedded Firebird DB on my websites (after 2.5 version improvements), advantages are obvious (no need to install anything, all dll-s you can put in your web site bin folder and FDB in App_Data – I am using asp.net technology).

My question is: does anybody has some experiences with this approach (Medium Trust shared hosting), and what limitation I might expect? How many concurrent users can be acceptable in such scenario, are there some known issues I need to be aware of and so? Is lack of security mechanism in embedded that big disadvantage for this approach?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

First off, I do not have any experience with Firebird. When googling though, I do see reports of problems using it in medium trust. But if you want to know for sure, just try! It might well be that the information I'm reading is old.

Concurrent users is a difficult question to be fairly honest. I suppose it (how many) depends on too many factors to give a good answer. But the most important thing you want to look at is concurrent writing. For example SQL Lite does not support this (afaik), and in a web application this is bound to happen. I think FB supports this, but you might want to check this to be sure.

About security; as far as I know FB does not support encryption nor password protection. This is a valid concern you express, if anyone compromises your server the FB file is there for grabbing. Methods to work around this are not pretty (encrypting before insert/update and decrypting at retrieval, or filesystem encryption), so if security is important this will be your biggest concern.

I'd like to state again that I do not have experience with FB myself, I just express the concerns I would have myself when thinking of such a scenario and try to get some information on the internet.