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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.
The only reason anyone even knows about them anyway is because of the former Mozilla Firebird. :O
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.
How does it compare to MySQL for web sites, that typically makes a lot of short connections to the same database?
{{.sig}}
I'm so glad this version of FireBird renders CSS properly... no wait...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
no it's a database!
It's not a matter of ease, they were around for a lot longer and had the name long before Mozilla co-opted it.
Finkployd
Seriously, though -- I hadn't heard of this particular firebird before the Mozilla fiasco happened. I'm sure I can speak for a lot of folks who couldn't name this project when asked to name the OSS database apps they know.
Of course now they'll be known as the folks that got the name "Firebird" when Firebird changed its name to Firefox. Oh yeah, and they make a database.
The only people I know that would use mysql as the backend for anything aren't DBA's. Why? Because it allows you to put crap in your database.. This has been debated countless times on /. so there's no point going through all the points again. Lets just say any DBA worth a grain of salt wouldn't use mysql.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Due to trademark infringement potential and other potential confusion, Firebird Database Engine has just changed its name to
F------d Database Engine
More news to follow.
P.S. For any lawyers, etc. reading this, the above is an example of "parody", not subject to the definition of "slander" or "libel".
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
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?
So, I typed in slashdot.org but somehow I ended up on freshmeat.net. wtf?
Firebird is SQL, not relational.
Yip yip yip! Ow! I sprained by brain!
Wow, two troll posts. You buy a sco license too?
I tried building the Firebird code a few months ago, and found out that step 1 is...
...start with a running version of Firebird!
Bootstrapping might seem like a K00l trick, but there is something uncomfortable about self-referential build procedures (not to mention that it was a pain in the ass to find a preexisting version of Firebird to run).
Gimme a pile of c/cpp & h files and let me build it from scratch, dammit!
Is that possible today? Dunno...the build guide appears to be still under construction.
Why are you people bashing so hard about the naming issue? You know what? I don't care!
I know Firebird DB since it's earlier days and I was a Interbase user before that. And I loved it. Why? Because the kind of job I did that time required a simple, efective, maintence-free database and Firebird is exactly that. You can just install it and forget it. The whole database is just one file (at least was) so a simple tar or zip will backup your stuff.
Yeah, yeah, I know there is MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc but as I said, I'm not on this kind of job anymore and even if I was, while firebird does what I want (and well) why should I care about other RDBMS?
Scientia est Potentia
You know what, a good product often has to revamp its image in order to accelerate takeup. I suggest they change their name to something fiesty, energetic and powerful-sounding.
Why not combine the fiestyness of a fox with the power of fire. I suggest something like Foxfire or Firefox!
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
to serve up pages, one to view them... and one Firebird to rule them all?
Karma: Contrapositive
>SQL is not relational. Its tables are not relations, because relations are sets, and sets don't contain duplicates.
Yeah, but if you relationate without any protection, you're going to somehow end up with look-alike duplicates...
Not quite true, it cause some maning conflicts in some distros (in gentoo firebird refers to the DB and mozilla-firebird refered to the browser).
How hard is it really to do a search on freshmeat, sourceforge, and google before you name a project? I do it all the time.
Plus it isn't like it was a dead project or a one person project, it had a (albiet not MySQL size) following and was under active development.
Sorry, I love Mozilla but they were in the wrong here.
Finkployd
Rows have implicit unique row ids which make each row unique. So, there are no duplicates.
I don't know a thing about Firebird, but I'm not prepared to dismiss it simply because of a name conflict with Firefox. Maybe it's a great database. Maybe they didn't treat Firefox fairly when disputing the duplicate name. Maybe they had a legitimate right to their name and the Mozilla folks should have been more diligent about picking a name.
Either way, I doubt the people at Firebird deserve the occasional vitriol from others on this thread.
--Nick
Also, from what I remember from the incident I had a very bad impression of the Firebird project. I no longer have any links but what I remember now about it (granted it may be totaly different from what actually happened.. but this is how I view it right now) was the Firebird people attacking Mozilla and writing a very forcefull letter demanding the name change. I believe that a less agressive approach would have produced the same results, and a more positive image for the company.
As far as the relational database vs SQL, I don't know *anything* about the firebird project. All I know is the title here on
I've already generated a ton of negative comments about my post, but remember this is just my opinion. It's the opinion of a linux sysadmin/perl monk/mysql user who is probably in thier target market. I'm just letting them know why I just don't care.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Well, firebird is definitely a good contender, but I still want a database server that's fast and small... and the faster and smaller the better. Problem is I need most of the features you'll see in a high end one, and I need it to be open source.. SQLite was actually a contender at one point, but I want replication as well.. so.. my question is when is someone gonna fill this niche?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
If you go to the Firebird Project website, you'll see they feature, quite respectfully, Mozilla's recent decision to change their name to Firefox. Remember that the Mozilla team has gone through a lot of name changes. Camino was changed to Chimera, and Phoenix was changed to the rather unfortunate "Firebird" which was already a project name. So it's not like the name "Firebird" was all that entrenched.
I think it's a symptom of Mozilla both try to brand, and being an Open Source project in which one monolithic product was split into various and sundry projects, each of which got bizarely named. I mean, there's nothing about any of the application titles that indicates its use or purpose.
I myself vote for MozillaMail and MozillaBrowser or something of that ilk instead of Thunderbird and Firefox. Then the package now called "Mozilla" could be renamed to MozillaComplete or something like that.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Mysql easy?? I couldn't even begin to get it to install so I had to revert old school and use a sheets of paper and a filing cabinet for my database.
I agree to an extent (the Pontiac example is a little extreme though). However, if it were the other way around I would bet good money that Mozilla would have gone after them. And if nothing else, it sets a bad precedence. This kind of namespace collision should be avoided in the OSS community where people are confused about what programs to use as it is.
Finkployd
There appears to be two broad groups on this site - the useful ones (you know their posts when you see them) and the other group.
Most of the posts I'm seeing here so far belong in the other group. Today they can't seem to get past a naming issue (which the DB had first BTW), and appear to have no interest in what the product is.
When you are reading *and writing* to your database and there is money attached to the data integrity, this product will be fine. MySQL will not. Just imagine that you are penalised personally $1000 for every data munge that occurs in your database? I imagine that your affinity to the MySQL mindset will start to wane rather quickly.
This database is right up with PostgreSQL and as an added bonus Firebird can be deployed on Windows and Linux. (Plus StroredProcs and Triggers galore)
If all you can focus on however, is the project name, then be angry that Mozilla rudely co-opted the name that the DB first owned.
And to all the slashdotters that despair at the rising tide of inane useless postings - well, you are not alone. Slashdot used to be about geek topics for geeks. New product releases, gotchas, advice, interesting hardware hacks, solving problems with FOSS etc. Now I must content myself with the current posting selections.
And now the ultimate tirade: If you want to feed your geek/technical fetish, it's getting to the point where you'd do better watching McGyver or something.
AC
I don't like the way they handled the Mozilla/Firebird naming issue.
If Mozilla had called their browser "Linux" or "Apache" or "Python" would you have taken the same position? Or do you feel it is only an issue if they choose the same name as a project you've personally worked with.
Mozilla was clearly in the wrong there, but they did the responsible thing and renamed their project to Firefox and even came up with a cool logo to match their new name. That issue is resolved to everyone's satisfaction, so why would you keep bringing it up after it is fixed? It's time to move on.
This is utter nonsense. I see the author's argument but it is incorrect and pedantic. In nearly all cases duplicate records are not returned. When I say "nearly all" the exceptions are: tables without a primary key containing otherwise duplicate rows, and the results of multiple SELECT statements using the "UNION ALL" keyword. UNION ALL tells the engine to go ahead and give me ALL of the rows including duplicates.
How about, why couldn't they just let things go?
= 3115). Perhaps if they had been a little more understanding and realized that the uproar about this took Mozilla by surprise as much as it did for them, maybe there wouldn't be some ill-will.
:)
Trademark law allows for things to have similar names if they're in different fields. Although both are in software, *nobody* who is looking for Firebird the database is going to confuse it with Firebird the browser, especially when both show up in the top 10 of google for 'firebird'. If anything, it goes the other way around.
In fact, out of this whole thing, the Firebird DB people probably benefited the most out of the whole charade. They got a bunch of free publicity, and as evidenced here, there's a crap load of people who now know what it is and would otherwise have no reason to.
And their conduct throughout the ordeal was less than sportsmanlike. True, MozillaFoundation probably should've done a little better checking on it, but most likely in their eyes they came to the same conclusion we did: confusion between the 2 projects wasn't likely. However, this didn't stop the FirebirdDB people from being near harrassing. Their first 'call to action' was to essentially mailbomb anyone and everyone Mozilla related (http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article
At the time, Mozilla.org was part of AOL. AOL's a big company. Big companies move slowly. The issue was going to be resolved (partially with the name Mozilla Firebird instead of just Firebird) anyway.
In the end, changing to Firefox was definitely the right thing to do. No confusion with anybody else, no wondering about what GM thinks about the name, brand spanking new logo, and clear skies until 1.0
I think that this reduces uptake of the database, becuase of the barriers to just taking a casual peek of their features. The whole documentation is just locked away with the keys.
Perhaps this is becuase they want more people to have paid support? A PDF manual is all well and good, but at least give us a bone to chew on with a feature list, reasons why people should use the database and so forth.
Newsfollow.com
Which old name?
It was once Netscape... until they screwed up in the market so bad that they gave up on it and released the source as:
Mozilla... until it became so bloated and overdesigned (and dangerously close to a movie company's trademark on a mutant lizard) that they had to start over as a project called:
Phoenix... which they forgot to check to see if that trademark had been used by a software company for about 20 years already, causing them to have to change it in a kneejerk reaction to:
Firebird... which they also forgot was already taken by a project that was already smart enough to not use "Phoenix". Thus causing them to switch once again to:
Firefox... which, (assuming they finally did their homework and checked on trademarks) is actually the best name since the original "Netscape".
the "Bitchin' Camaro Database"... :)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
How about the fact that their first response to the browser name was to mail bomb everyone at Mozilla?
Yeah, I guess that's how adults act....
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
While Postgres is the better database, installing Firebird/Interbase is a much easier task for the average user. That makes it a terrific little cross-platform client-caching database, such as letting the spreadsheet users slice at the data with an ODBC driver without killing the primary database server. For the same reasons, it's a handy tool for writing small standalone database apps without locking in to a Win32 codebase (e.g. MS Access.) I'd say it even has potential to serve the same kind of markets that the "light" servers like Sybase SQL Anywhere serve.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Slashdot reported it when Interbase was first announced to be going open source, and followed up on the actual releases afterward, so lots of people cared a few years ago. Interbase keeps getting mentioned by users in more general database discussions as well, so at least some Slashdot users still care, even users who are more interested in database features than in database names.
I too love postgresql, but let's be honest:
.org site is PostgreSQL.
1: The OO stuff as regards table inheritence is broken, and no one's in a hurry to fix it.
2: It's easy for me to install, for some people, not so much.
3: FirebirdSQL is just as free as PostgreSQL, using their own version of the Mozilla Public License.
The main things that PostgreSQL is that FirebirdSQL is not is heavily tested in enterprise environments. Remember, every time you go to slashdot.org, the database serving up that site is MySQL, but the database serving up the IP for that
However, I totally agree there's a negative probability that anyone will ever use the name Postgresql for any other project.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Configuration, what you seem to be talking about, is not rocket science either. Of course it is harder than configuring MySQL, because it does more. In the case of access permissions, PostgreSQL seperates database permissions (GRANT SELECT ON some_table TO some_user) and the right to connect to the server in the first place (which you set up in pg_hba.conf). This is more work than the pure GRANT-based scheme of MySQL, where GRANTs not only based on user id, but also the remote host etc. It is also more flexible - For example, PostgreSQL can authenticate a connection with Kerberos or PAM - as far as I know, this is not possible, or at least not trivial, with MySQL.
As always, both have their place. If you want easy, use MySQL. If you want flexible, use PostgreSQL. Firebird's claim to fame in this regard has to be filled in by someone else, I don't know it well enough :-)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I've used it in several projects, over the years. In my day job, we recently added Firebird to the list of databases that we support as warehouse targets for our application. Firebird's instant installation, small footprint, and portability (a few meg) are good reasons to do this. Another good reason is that it outperforms Oracle on the same hardware, as well as several other commercial databases.
We used to deploy Interbase as part of a product at a company I worked at years back. We would install, start the system (which had multi-gigabyte databases at times), and then not look at it again for YEARS. Two years could go by without tuning, transaction log clearing, or anything else, for that matter. It doesn't have transaction logs (doesn't need them), and sweeps itself clear of most detritus automatically.
Backups could effortlessly be done on the fly. Full two-phase commit support. And when it comes to complex transactions, it's one of the best databases out there because of its generational architecture (something it shares with PostgreSQL).
There are a few rough edges on it, like the lack of a standard GUI administration tool. Java support was slow to evolve. The lack of care given by Borland hurt the product for a time. The Firebird people seem to have done a lot of hard work, and deserve praise.
And for the record, Firefox or whatever the hell it is calling itself this week is one of the stupidest excuses for a software package I've seen to date. It's Mozilla minus most of the features that make Moz useful and extensible. It doesn't run any faster than Moz in resident mode. It performs no useful function I am aware of. The adulation it receives utterly escapes me; it seems to be a prime example of building software for the past. The engineering effort would have been far better spent on Moz itself.
Then, just to mix things up, you have SAP DB, which is open source with a very proprietary background, much like Firebird. And probably with a lot of the same problems in terms of administration and code accessibility.
I certainly wish the developers no ill will, or to disparage their efforts -- but I've yet to see the argument for using Firebird outside of legacy projects. It's easy to argue MySQL vs. Firebird, but PostgreSQL is the real competitor.
Well maybe they don't like *your* attitude! You, sitting there, picking the fluff out of your fat ass and making condescending statements like the above!! ;)
These are commited people, spending their own time on a quality database that is available to everyone. You don't have to use it, but don't bleat about just 'cos somehow they've upset you because of a product naming arguement that in all likelyhood you are probably not a party to anyway!
I mean, regardless of if you think Firebird-SQL, Mozilla or both were in the wrong over the naming debacle, it is now resolved, and the vast majority here are fortunate to have the opportunity to use *BOTH* for free without having to do a thing.
So climb down off the moral high-ground, and say something constructive or nothing at all!
Hardly. They did publish a list of people the express dissatisfaction to, which in hindsight was an incredibly stupid mistake, but the wording wasn't anywhere near the "spam/flame all these people" you make out. Arguably they didn't expect many people to respond as the Firebird community (much like the Delphi community that uses Firebird) is fairly small, tight-knit and rational - so they didn't expect people to behave childishly by flooding the mailboxes of the Mozilla team.
However, because it made "good news" to have an open-source battle (or to create one, which the media is sometimes guilty of) it gained publicity fast and was picked up by people on both sides, including those who'd probably used neither product who thought it'd be good to fan the flames and as a result things escalated wildly - to the extent that some stupid Firebird fanboys mailbombed the Moz devteam while on the other hand some idiotic Mozilla zealots found an SSL bug in the Firebird website and deleted everything...
So to say that only the "FirebirdDB people" handled things improperly is a pretty wide-sweeping generalisation that, if you stepped back a bit and checked out the facts, might reveal a slight subconscious leaning to Mozilla 'cause you like their browser? I've used both products and saw plenty of mistakes made on *both sides*...
FYI I did a a writeup of events last time around.
With "current MySql versions", you mean the pre-alpha development release which for example will have (potentially crude) stored procedures? As opposed to the current unsupported beta version, which is the first to finally have subqueries (of course, after years of telling customers that you don't want them anyway, just as MySQL AB did with all other basic DBMS features they only now promise to support in a few years)?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
We are about to ship a cross platform Struts (java) based application and needed a simple, low maintenance, low overhead, cross-platform,truly free and fast sql engine.
Enter Firebird. Installation is a breeze under both operating systems and its all plug and play after that.
MySQL is nice but can be a maintenance headache and good luck included it in a shipping product, it violates the license or so the lawyers tell me.
I use mysql on my webservers, I embed firebird in my shipping products. Its been great so far!
It was once Netscape... until they screwed up in the market so bad that they gave up on it and released the source as:
Mozilla... until it became so bloated and overdesigned (and dangerously close to a movie company's trademark on a mutant lizard) that they had to start over as a project called:
That's a bit harsh - how about unfair competition? Anyway, "Mozilla" was the internal codename for Navigator at Netscape. It has always been it's name and it still is today (now for the whole suite).
To quote the "Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla " :
Mozilla was a term initially created by Jamie Zawinsky and company during the development of Navigator. The team was working at a similarly frantic pace to create a beast vastly more powerful than Mosaic, and the word became the official code name for Navigator.Firefox... which, (assuming they finally did their homework and checked on trademarks) is actually the best name since the original "Netscape".
They better! The name is catchy and the logo is quite beautiful. Try "Help" > "About Mozilla Firefox".
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
The documentation on the sight is dated / plagued:
...
"Last 10 Releases"
31-Dec-1969 firebird 1.5.0-Release (Source)
1969? That's a neat trick. Hopefully development is a little more dedicated than documentation.
Looking at the list of who's deploying the DB on which platforms, the organization list is impressive, but where's current information?
"This page was last updated on 2000-12-31 21:23:04 -0400" doesn't impart warm fuziness, nor do the few references to Linux kernel 2.2.x.
Who's managing the project, and why do they suck at advocating it?
Obviously you can generate duplicate rows any number of ways if you include non-unique column combinations in your SELECT.
In any rate, because SQL allows you to create a table *without* a primary key (which then means that result sets can have duplicate rows) then it is not relational. End of story.
No one is saying that SQL is double-plus ungood, just pointing out that it is not relational (just as saying that 2+2 != 5, and the sky is not made of fish), and don't attribute deficiencies of SQL to deficiencies of the relational model.
You can begin to understand how Date and Pascal et al at DBDebunk.com feel if you consider the following scenario (this thought exercise presupposes that perfect is possible):
Now that this long-winded description is over you can replace The Perfect Car with The Relational Model and "Perfect Car" Implementations with {Oracle, MySQL, etc.}. You can replace "New Perfect Car Models" (including "Without Significant Scientific Background") with {XML, OO-DBMS, 'Persistence Layers', etc.}.
No one is saying that you cannot use SQL products or XML, or that you cannot accomplish tasks in these tools, just that when used in the context of data management they are poorly solving what the Relational Model already solved.
Because IT practitioners are poorly educated and increasingly fad-driven they latch onto non-solutions (like XML, "Post-Relational", OO-DBMS, etc.) and put little or no pressure on DBMS vendors to get it right. Even worse, if someone does release a Truly Relational DBMS there are no guarantees that anyone will buy it due to the ignorance of the IT community.
Put simply: People don't know what they're missing, so they don't know to ask.
Thanks,
--
Matt
What language? What platform?
Let's start with a nice Win32 Gui to administer the db: IBExpert
OK, now the drivers: there are plenty of ODBC, OleDB, .NET and JDBC drivers available. I personally use IBProvider,
it's a OleDB driver. I have also used the open sourced
ODBC
driver with great success.
RowIDs typically are:
1) Not visible to the user
2) Based on physical (e.g. on-disk) row placement (e.g. Oracle's ROWID pseudocolumn)
Both of these are violations of the relational model.
If, however, every table had a unique sequence number or something, then sure they would not be materially in breach of the uniqueness constraint. However, remember that result sets are *also* relations so you would have to have DISTINCT appended to every SELECT statement to also pass the uniqueness test.
Thanks,
--
Matt
There's a lot of examples of what MySQL can't do, but I'll just give two. Let's say you want to do this:This SELECT gets all words used in an article, and looks them up in a dictionary. You can't do this in MySQL.
What you can do in the latest alpha versions is this:But this will only return one row, so it's not the same. Other DB systems will also let you create functions inside the database, which can be reused later.
Another thing you can't do with MySQL is set up DOMAINs (or constraints); with Postgres you can specify that a field in a table should be an integer, but only integers between (for instance) 1 and 1,000,000.
And it's a lot more. But admittedly most people won't be needing the advanced functions a lot, if at all, so if MySQL suits your need just use it. Databases are a little like other tools: You use the one that's best suited for the job.
That is one thing you should never do. Never ever trust any web site as authoritative.
What could be good for you is to read the arguments critically, and think. Perhaps even get a book, either on you library or buying it -- Date's _An Introduction to Database Systems_ *is* the standard reference textbook in the area, so it's worth it.
BTW, all caps in a title is perfectly accepted practice.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin