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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.
no it's a database!
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
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
to serve up pages, one to view them... and one Firebird to rule them all?
Karma: Contrapositive
I'm also an Oracle guy. I find MySQL loathesome and inadquate for all buy toy-level applications. I see Firebird and PostgreSQL both as viable midrange solutions. I think they each could work in settings were you aren't really stressing the newest features of Oracle, but want "standard" RDBMS functionality. Both have stored procedures, triggers, and some kinds of subqueries (at least in the WHERE clause -- oracle has them also in the from clause and even in the SELECT clause).
I think you'll find that materialized views, at least as far as doing refresh-on-commit and query rewriting, are a really advanced feature that only Oracle has. In many warehousing or decision support applications, they are a must have feature that makes the difference between project success and failure.
Assuming you aren't in such a high performance setting, you can often simulate a materialized view by simply populating a transformation table using stored procedures. In such settings, I think either Firebird or PostgreSQL would work fine, cost less, and avoid icky proprietary licence restrictions.
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.
Firebird has a few minor claims to fame.
What about distributed transactions? AFAIK, no other open source relational database supports them (neither PostgreSQL, nor MAXDB, nor MySQL). I do quite a bit of distributed object programming, so I can't do without distributed transactions, and Firebird's work well.
What about server-side event notification? AFAIK PostgreSQL is the only other open source relational database that supports them. Switching from a polling architecture to event notification can yield huge performance benefits.
What about nested transactions? Firebird 1.5 supports savepoints, which are a basic rendition of nested transactions. AFAIK, MAXDB is the only other open source relational database with nested transaction support (though MAXDB's are full-fledged nested transactions, not just savepoints).
This isn't just some Firebird-propaganda-bullet-list. I find all these features indispensable.