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Firebird Relational Database 1.5 Final Out
firebirdy writes "The Firebird Project is pleased to announce that the v1.5 release of the Firebird database engine is now available for immediate download. The v1.5 release represents a major upgrade to the engine, which has been developed by an independent team of voluntary developers from the InterBase(tm) source code that was released by Borland under the InterBase Public License v.1.0 on 25 July 2000. Development on the Firebird 2 codebase began early in Firebird 1 development, with the porting of the Firebird 1 C code to C++ and the first major code-cleaning. Firebird 1.5 is the first release of the Firebird 2 codebase. Install packages are currently only available for Windows and Linux but other platforms should follow shortly." This product is not to be confused with newly renamed Firefox web browser, which was also called Firebird for some time.
Just kind of curious if anyone would care at all if there hadn't been the big stink with the name conflicts.
I mean, has anyone used this database? Is it really of any note that v1.5 is out?
-- taking over the world, we are.
Specifically what did they do wrong in your eyes? When Mozilla takes an existing project's name are they just supposed to accept it and change their name? That doesn't sound very fair.
Finkployd
I work as a data-mining professional and aside from creating statistical models on flat-files, I manage the process of transforming and joining relational databases into a a flat file for model building.
Currently we use Oracle for this work, but in the past we tried switching to MySQL but found that it lacked some of the key features such as materialized views, nested sub-queries and a variety of Oracle SQL functions that we find useful. MySQL seemed to be geared towards maintaining a real-time database to support customer interaction, rather than as an environment for assembling static data sources.
Could Firebird be a viable open-source alternative, or are there others?
That's all well and good, except that you're completely wrong. First, you can back up any database that uses OS-level files using tar and gzip - that's certainly nothing special for Interbase/Firebird. Second, we experienced table corruptions constantly that resulted in rows that were still present in the table, but couldn't be fetched. Relational integrity means jack squat when referenced rows suddenly cease to be accessible.
Interbase/Firebird obviously worked for at least some people, or else it would've been altogether dropped years ago, but it's bitten enough people that it's just not accurate to call it "maintence-free" (unless that has a backhand slam at the abyssmal state of the administrative tools, and you meant "-free" as in "-not-capable-of").
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To each his own. Firefox is definitely faster than the Mozilla Suite, aka Seamonkey. You haven't really used it have you? Firefox not useful and extensible? Are you kidding? With XUL and its extension engine it is incredibly extensible.
Note that in my comments about FirebirdSQL, I only mentioned the company. I haven't used the database and so I will acknowledge that it may very well be a great database, whereas it would appear that you clearly have not used Fx if you honestly think it's not extensible. And if it is the case that you haven't used it, you can hardly call it a poor excuse for a software package.
This is obviously going to get modded down as flamebait or trolling, as is always the case on Slashdot when a good debateable topic comes up.