Fyracle: Oracle-Mode Firebird

mAriuZ writes "A beta is currently available that allow Firebird to support the major Oracle-based ERP/CRM application Compiere with virtually no change to the Compiere code base. No other proprietary or open-source database system can currently do this. The best part : Fyracle is open source if you want to compile it manually it's a set of patches that needs to be run over the firebird 1.5.1 source tree."

Comments

For those who need it

[xilmaril]

just for everyone with bad memory who didn't read the article (that'd be almost everyone),

it's FireBIRD, not FireFOX. it's the open source database that caused the browser to change it's name.

They've developed a version of Firebird that acts interchangeably with Oracle database. Which is good, since now people have a free alternative just in case they want it.

Re:Explanation please

[Red Pointy Tail]

Compiere is an open-source implementation of an ERP+CRM system, the catch is that it requires expensive Oracle databases (as much of the functionality has been encoded using Oracle SPs and such). There have been lots of talk about migrating it to other databases like PostgreSQL and donations were even seeked but not much have progressed... until now.

Firebird (not to be confused with the Firefox browser) is another open source database based on Borland/Inprise InterBase - much improved now of course. Last I checked half a year ago, it has full ACID, distributed transactions *with savepoints* (postgreSQL can't), external/internal stored procs, triggers, subselects, referential integrity, ANSI compliant SQL, SMP support, ODBC/JDBC, triggers, up to 64Tb Databases, embedded build, native WIN32 build ... and ... with an amazingly small footprint of 2.5MB installation.

Anyway, it seems to me that the crux of Fyracle is not that they rewritten Compiere to run on Firebird. It seems like they engineered a layer to implement all Oracle-like features on Firebird. Anything written natively for Oracle should be able to run off it! If they can pull it off, you can just rip out Oracle and place Firebird in.

However, direct compatibility may not mean the ported application will run with the same performance and integrity as on an Oracle DB. But it is a very good step forward.

Necessary evil

[leandrod]

This is a (perhaps) necessary evil. The right thing to do would be to port Compiere to ISO SQL. The problem is that at the moment only IBM DB2 is standards-compliant. PostgreSQL comes close, but fails miserably on some important accounts for inertia: AUTOCOMMIT, CONSTRAINT ... NOT DEFERRABLE INITIALLY IMMEDIATE, lack of SQL/PSM...