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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."
Is there anything they can't do?
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.
I've been watching the devel list as those creating fyracle have been asking about how to go about implementing this compatibility ... don't expect these features to be merged into the main tree. Oracle's made some pretty silly design decisions along the way, and other database teams/vendors take exception at the suggestion they should reproduce the quirks found in other products. They're trying to build a good system from the ground up, nice and clean -- not copy every good or bad decision someone else made.
For some of us, that's a really good thing: ideas get re-thought and we get better solutions. For others, yes, that's a bad thing: software vendors go implementing their solutions for only one database server that costs out the butt, and think nothing of it -- software's expensive, why not make it more expensive? The client pays for it anyway, not the vendor. There are two solutions here: make a cheaper version of the database server (fyracle) or recode the application so it's not oracle-specific.
How many Oracle-clone databases do we need? Should we encourage vendors to continue making oracle-only software, should we encourage them to use badly-designed language features? (Oracle's a bit of a whore as far as implementing just about anything they think will get software sold -- even if it's an absolutely abysmal idea.)
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.
... and ... with an amazingly small footprint of 2.5MB installation.
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
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.