>>I have created a table with 10000 records in Firebird and a simple select * is slow. Over network @ 100 Mbps it takes a long time to fetch 10000 rows. The same is a snap in SQL Server or Mysql and only slightly slower in Postgre.
>>
>>Am I doing something wrong? I didn't change any settings after Firebird installation.
>
>I tested on another system this is a Intel core 2 duo, 1 gb ram. The results are contradictory to my first test. I don't understand what could be the difference.
>I did a select * on a table with 1,25,000 rows on 4 databases. All 4 databases have exactly the same data, with synchronous connection in all the 4 cases. The results are:
>

>Database                time taken in Seconds
>Mysql 5.1                   3.448
>SQL Server 2005             3.446
>Postgre 8.3                 3.933
>Firebird 2.1                2.383
>

>Firebird much ahead in speed, Mysql & SQL Server neck to neck, Postgre only a little behind but giving better performance with every repeated query.

I am always telling people to *measure* performance if there is an issue, but the trick is to measure something relevant to your app. For a web app that means measure the edxpected no. of connections hitting at the same time and measuring n-fold hits as well to approximate scalability. For a desktop app you might compare reading all data with one connection or opening additional connections and reading in background/parallell if massive amounts of data are read. But - how often do you plan to use select * whithout where-clause in your app ?

regards

thomas