Re: [Firebird-docs] Limitations of Firebird

[Paul V. <pa...@vi...>]

Hello Ricardo,

> I am a Brazilian developer and I'm about to release the new version
> of a LIS (Laboratory Information System) developed under Delphi +
> Firebird. A frequent concern of my clients is about the limitations
> of the database.  Some of them uses a SQL Server based system and
> have tables with up to 500.000 rows. I imagine that firebird don't
> have such limitations.

No problem indeed. There are many Firebird databases in use that have
millions of rows.

> Although, I have to convince my clients. It would be really usefull
> to me if there was some documentation regarding to this issues. Do
> you know some?

From the InterBase 6 Operations Guide, page 27:

  Maximum number of rows and columns per table:

  By design, 2^32 [note: that's over 4 billion - PV] rows, because
  rows are enumerated with a 32-bit unsigned integer per table.

  Number of columns in a row depends on datatypes used. One row
  can be 64K. For example, you can define 16,384 columns of type
  INTEGER (four bytes each) in one table.

Firebird is based on the InterBase 6 code. Limits have not been
lowered. In some cases they have been raised. I don't know of an
official Firebird doc that states the max. number of rows, but you can
safely assume that it's still 2^32 or more. (Of course there are other
limitations: max file size; max number of files per database; etc.)

You can find the Operations Guide through this page:

  http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=doc&id=userdoc

Or use this direct download link:

  http://www.ibphoenix.com/downloads/60OpGuide.zip


Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog