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Firebird Goes Gold

Posted by timothy on from the can-a-bird-that-heavy-fly? dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "A lot has happened since Borland open sourced their Interbase database. Borland has since come out with a new closed source version of Interbase, forcing the Phoenix group to fork the codebase, calling their new database Firebird. Over the past month they have come out with Firebird version 1.0 for various UNIX variants, Windows, and Mac OS X and are now working on moving the code base from C to C++. A great description of Firebird is found here. To show your support, order Firebird on CD."

1 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Re:InterBase performance? by joib · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hejsan Lasse! :)

    Disclaimer: I have used MySQL (a little) and PgSQL (a lot more) but not FB (nor IB), so I'm just repeating what I have read somewhere.

    My impression is that FB and PgSQL are quite similar. Both have multiversion cuncurrency control, ACID compliancy, stored procedures, triggers, referential integrity and a lot of other cool stuff. Both support large subsets of SQL92, outer joins, subselects etc.
    PgSQL, on one hand, is a classical unix style forking multi-process server, whereas FB has both a multi-process and a multithreaded model. The advantage of the multithreaded model is of course a shared cache, but FB:s threaded version doesn't work on multiprocessor machines. Anyway, on unix at least PgSQL uses posix (or was it sysv?) shm to get a shared cache. On the other hand, the windows version of PgSQL is a cygwin hack, whereas FB has a native win version.

    MySQL, on the other hand, does not (currently) play in the same league. Yes, with simple queries and low concurrency (albeit a common situation) it probably smokes both FB and PgSQL speedwise. IMHO MySQL suffers from limited SQL support, table level locking and lack of ACID properties. For more info check out this page which describes some of the problems with MySQL in more detail (and of course there is a super-long flamewar at the end too...). Anyway, MySQL 4 (alpha) apparently supports more SQL constructs, and new tablehandlers give it row-level locking (or even multiversion concurrency control) and at least some limited ACID capabilities, so the gap between MySQL and PgSQL/FB appears to be shrinking fast..

    And then there is of course SAPDB, which appears to be very impressive according to the few people who have tried it.

    In the end, I think all of them are excellent (with some reservations towards MySQL and SAPDB). And of course they are all free (duh!). I'd say FB has better windows support than PgSQL and certainly has better delphi drivers, whereas PgSQL would be better on a multiprocessor unix/linux box.