How does the SRB compare to commercial software?
As far as we know, there is no commercial product much like the SRB (except for the commercial version of the SRB, see below). The biggest difference between commercial software and research products like the SRB is the lack of a Quality Assurance testing group. But we do a lot of testing of new features, as do our collaborative sites, and we have recently developed some automatic testing scripts and systems. SRB is also a mature product as it has been in production use since 1997. In 2000, a government agency thoroughly examined the code and provided us with fixes (memory overruns, etc). The design is such that most problems are fail-safe, due the the client/server design, and cross-checks within our MCAT library and of the DMBS systems themselves. We build on the quality and robust-features of modern DBMSs.
