Firebird 2.0 Final Released

Samyem Tuladhar writes "After 2 years in development, the Firebird Project today officially releases the much-anticipated version 2.0 of its open source Firebird relational database software during the opening session of the fourth international Firebird Conference in Prague, Czech Republic."

Comments

Finally...

[Bourdain]

Now I can finally convince my friends to upgrade their web browser from Firebird 0.6 :)

Re:Finally...

[LittleBigLui]

That's because trademarks apply only to the business areas they are registered for. For example, the manufacturer of shiny computers can use the same name as the record label that released the Beatles' records, since they aren't in the same business. (Until ITMS, that is.)

Firebird-the-database is a DBMS, which, as everyone knows, is a big piece of metal that doesn't move and holds important data. Firefox-the-browser is a vehicle for travelling through the intartubes. It's obvious that the former is almost (but not quite) entirely unlike a car, whereas you probably would need a drivers' licence to use the latter, if it weren't for the lawlessness of teh intartubewebs.

How does this compare?

[IcEMaN252]

I must admit to be rather ignorant of Firebird, how does it compare to other RDBMSs out there?

Re:How does this compare?

[Shados]

While I have never used it myself, I have heard nothing but praises from it, including from the Microsoft programmer community side. It is supposed to be full featured, quite fast, and can be used as an embedded database by just shipping a single DLL (on Windows, dunno how it goes on Unix side of things) with your app, thus allowing for a lot of flexibility. It has a lot more feature than even most commercial embedded database, and is supposed to be very easy on the developer, and its drivers are quite complete for java, .net, etc.

Re:How does this compare?

[jozeph78]

We used it at my last shop, maintaining a database file for each "project" and a master database to keep track them. Keeping it in it's realm, it's leagues beyond HSQL or Derby and other databases I've worked with of it's caliber.

It was not without the quirks and kludgey features expected of a 1.0 database. Some of the unusual things (to me) were setting a Term character for scipts, lack of "if exists"/"create or replace", "suspend" in procedures, and identity ID's via triggers. That said, it had triggers as well as fully functional stored procedures, user defined functions, custom exceptions to deliver nice error messages to your JDBC layer and even a simple c API to write low level custom functions that were easily compiled into the db.

The guys always made fun of FireBird for being slow until I replaced rebuilding a hierarchical structure via java (single JDBC call per record) with a recursive stored procedure (single JDBC call for collection in order). JDBC usually incurs a good deal of overhead but I've never seen it so costly as in this case. Removing this JDBC overhead brought the longer running cases of 30-40 seconds (consider this lag opening a word document), down to 1-2 seconds. So the query engine of FireBird is quite efficient considering you know how to sweet talk it. :D

In the process of writing that procedure I discovered that the documentation for FireBird is actually quite good, albeit somewhat confusing with the Interbase/Firebird ambiguity. What I couldn't find in the documentation I found in a rather active FireBird Yahoo Group (may have been Google, whatever).

Don't go comparing it to MySql, PostGRE, Oracle XE, or MSSQL Express. I'm not sure how the performance for databases larger than the amount of available memory will work meaning, I've never profied the IO performance. Still, it's a great alternative to storing complex data structures as binary files or stubbing a prototype db for rapid development.

Ultimately, I'm excited about the new release of FireBird. Kudos to the team.

Re:How does this compare?

[vhogemann]

I have some experience with it on Linux,

We used Firebird on a project called "Remédio em Casa" (Medicine at Home), for the Rio de Janeiro city Health Department. People suffering from a heart condition or diabetes would come to a public hospital, get their diagnoses, an then receive medicine for 3 months of treatment at their homes, by mail.

The patient data is sent to a Java Servlet by a Delphi desktop Application, the medical subscript data is sent to the Post Office along with the patient address, and everything was stored on a Firebird database running on Debian Linux.

Last time I was involved with the project, we had a 3GB database, with over 270 thousand people attended... Somebody from the brazilian Firebird user Group told us that this was the largest Firebird database in operation at Brasil :-)

I can only tell good things about Firebird. It has a straight forward command line interface, its easy to manage, backup and restore, and has an excellent performance.

Just my $0.02

Re:How does this compare?

[flurdy]

> It was not without the quirks and kludgey features expected of a 1.0 database.

Well it was not 1.0 database, more like a v 7 or 8 consider v1 was based on interbase 6 and as mentioned in post further down has been around for 20+ years.

Ive been using it for 4 years now, and we offer it as our prefered database for our products, but the customers can use ms sql server or oracle if they prefer. Choosing other rdbms databases offer nothing more for us, except they cost loads of money.

One thing firbird lacks is a cross database queries ala sql server.
And a proper free replication tool.

Please do not compare it to Ms Access and other rubbish. Even MySQL is too lightweight in comparision.(pre v5 at least) Firebird can be compared to proper rdbms' like oracle, db2, ms sql server etc.

If you use IBExpert etc the admin is very easy (http://www.ibexpert.com),
And for simple web sites, IBWebAdmin (http://www.ibwebadmin.net).

I did read somewhere 2 years ago, that Firbird was used by 40% of all enterprise level open source applications/websites. Most others were naturally MySQL or PostGres. That number was higher than expected, but I suppose it didn't include the mickey mouse CRUD phpish websites/applications.

Re:How does this compare?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, to use the app via Terminal Services the solution is to prefix IpcName in firebird.conf with
"Global\" (without quotes).

regards,

Guess they were right to complain

[ghazban]

Who else thought this must be old news or a dupe after reading the title! I think they should change their version number to avoid confusion... Firebird v2.3-notawebrowser.

DUPE!

[damiena]

Come on editors... They changed the name to Firefox how long ago? Not only that, but 2.0 was released like 3 weeks ago. I could of sworn I saw an article on slashdot even... Way to read your own site.

Oh, with... this is a database? Hmmm... they should probably change their name so that people won't get confused all the time.

Huh?

[Senjutsu]

Firefox, Thunderbird, Firebird...

I'm confused.

Re:Huh?

[GoogolPlexPlex]

Thunderfox

Re:Huh?

[DragonHawk]

"Thunderfox"

Ice Weasel!

Alright, alright, I'm going, I'm going...

Re:Huh?

[astrosmash]

Firefox's original name was "Phoenix", as the browser was meant to rise from the ruins of the old Netscape/Mozilla application suite. The Phoenix BIOS guys complained that people would confuse Phoenix the browser with Phoenix the BIOS, so they changed the name to Firebird, which is still quite a bit like a phoenix. Then the Firebird database guys complained for the same reason. Thus the name Firefox was born, a trademark now vigorously defended by the Mozilla organization.

It didn't work, though. My first thought when I read this article was that it's some Mozilla project. The Firebird guys would have been better off renaming their project, since few people had heard of it anyway. And my new computer doesn't even have a BIOS.

Re:Huh?

[mdfst13]

"The Firebird guys would have been better off renaming their project,"

How so? I doubt that /. would have posted this story if it weren't for the name confusion. I certainly wouldn't have know what Firebird was if not for Mozilla.

Re:Huh?

[Reality Master 101]

Firefox, Thunderbird, Firebird... I'm confused

I think it's a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Re:Huh?

[KarmaMB84]

EFI is the newest incompatible BIOS replacement.

It is a database people

[IntelliAdmin]

FireBird is a database system that has been used in many projects. It has nothing to do with Firefox or any browser or email client. Just go to the website to check it out

From the website: Firebird 2.0 is the happy culmination of more than two years' efforts from a broad-ranging, truly international community of dedicated developers and supporters. It brings with it a large collection of long-awaited enhancements that significantly improve performance, security and support for international languages and realise some desirable new SQL language features. Under the surface, it also provides a much more robust code platform from which the re-architecting planned for Firebird 3.0 is proceeding.

http://www.windows-admin-tools.com

Really cool but...

[LWATCDR]

The problem is
99% of all open source projects that use a database support MySQL.
maybe 10% have some support for Postgres.
and I don't know of any that support Firebird.
We really need to see some more support for databases other than MySQl

Re:Really cool but...

[griffjon]

Or, and I know this may be a bit revolutionary, how about a database abstraction layer and support for anything that speaks SQL, brought forward to the user/administrator interface? I imagine most projects are using libraries that support this anyhow...

Re:Really cool but...

[aligma]

"and I don't know of any that support Firebird." Its the other -9%.

Re:Really cool but...

[msobkow]

99% of commercial applications that can pay your rent and put bread-and-butter on the table use Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, or SQLServer/Sybase10.

100% of applications that I'd trust with any personal data like credit cards run under the first three of those databases.

For applications that don't have such stringent requirements, you might want to pull your head out of the smelly sphincter of non-standard MySQL syntax and try working with something that can handle joins of more than 5-7 tables without crumbling. Firebird happens to be one -- it's the open sourced version of Borland's database engine, which has kicked MSAccess around the block on performance and standards compliance long before it was open sourced.

With a couple years of additional development, I expect the new version probably does an even better job of supporting ANSI92 SQL and common language drivers.

What I can't understand is why everyone still goes ga-ga over MySQL. It doesn't follow standards for syntax, it doesn't scale for statement complexity, and it's reputation for reliability and recoverability is deservedly bad.

Don't get me wrong. Use what works. But there are so many application profile variants that it's quite narrow minded to presume one database fits all, especially when you try to pick the weakest runt in the litter as your panacea.

Re:Really cool but...

[ninjaz]

What I can't understand is why everyone still goes ga-ga over MySQL. It doesn't follow standards for syntax, it doesn't scale for statement complexity, and it's reputation for reliability and recoverability is deservedly bad.

I think it is mostly due to historical reasons, and because MySQL hangs out in the sweet spot for many uses. I started using MySQL in 1997. In 1997, the only free SQL databases around for skunkworks projects were MySQL and miniSQL, version 1 of which had a single-threaded engine making it unusable for multi-user applications like anything on the web, and its version 2 would returned random query results due to some persistent bug. Even PostgreSQL was looking unmaintained and wasn't a viable option.

At the same time, Linux, Free Software and web applications started taking off, so everyone started using it on Linux for SQL work since it was the only reasonable choice. Of course, once Linux became popular and corporate managers found out their companies used it, the big database vendors ended up porting, too, but MySQL had already gained its fame and was a free download.

Now that PostgreSQL and Firebird are around, I am pleased to see free software applications getting compatibility.

For what it's worth, working with MySQL has put quite a few loaves of bread on my table. ;) (along with Oracle, DB2, Sybase, PostgreSQL...)

Re:Really cool but...

[killjoe]

"What I can't understand is why everyone still goes ga-ga over MySQL. It doesn't follow standards for syntax, it doesn't scale for statement complexity, and it's reputation for reliability and recoverability is deservedly bad."

Let me try and explain it to you.

Mysql was first to market (the market of open source database engines) with the features that people really want. Full text indexing, replication, clustering, ODBC drivers, etc.

Now maybe their replication wasn't all that hot but it took five minutes to set up and it worked. It took posgtres years to get a replication solution and even then it's complex and hard to set up.

Maybe other databases have cool features like referential integrity and stored procs but you know what most people didn't care about those. They wanted a web site that could take hits and in order to do that they needed replication. No matter what postgres had until it had replication and full text indexing it just wasn't an option.

I am about to start on a new project and I really want to use postgres but you know what I am not going to. I am going to use mysql because my preliminary tests show that it's faster and I need clustering and replication. Slony only supports master slave, the slonyII wiki hasn't been touched in years. Never mind all the cool stuff postgres has, I can't use it. Too bad because I really like it.

Re:Really cool but...

[vadim_t]

Not really possible. Differences run a lot deeper than just syntax.

For example, take mySQL and PostgreSQL. They've got vastly different locking methods: mySQL does row locking, while PostgreSQL does MVCC. Databases like mySQL like small, short running transactions because otherwise things start getting caught on locks and performance goes way down. PostgreSQL on the other hand LOVES big transactions to the point that you can BEGIN ; SELECT * FROM multi_gb_table ; COMMIT as a perfectly good backup strategy, and gets worse performance if you don't use transactions (implicit transaction per statement) as the overhead is pretty big.

In fact, unless you get caught with the following problem, forgetting to commit for an hour in PostgreSQL has no noticeable effect besides the lack of database vaccuuming (removal of unused rows), while mySQL would quickly grind to a halt if you did that.

Then you have the quirks. For example, PostgreSQL does use locks in one case: foreign keys. It's possible to get a deadlock if you have transactions that modify the table referenced by a foreign key constraint, because the lock is placed to ensure the constraint is still satisfied by the end of the transaction. This can even happen if you don't change the primary key column, which is the whole concern here.

A postgresql specific workaround is splitting the table in two: One with just the primary key to use for the constraints, and another for the actual data. Besides ugly, this is a PostgreSQL-specific workaround. For mySQL you'd hit something else instead, which probably works perfectly fine in PostgreSQL.

Trying to design a database that works with every DB provider would end up as an unholy mess of ugly workarounds like that, and seriously bad performance in at least one of them.

Firebird is nice

[mashmorgan]

I' use MSSQL, mySQL and Interbase/firebird. Each has their own strengths but for me I've been using Interbase so when Firebird came on the scene I starting porting apps. Unlike some of the others, it was x-platform a long time ago and was/am using it for Stored procedures etc. Nowadays I tend to use mySQL as the syntax is more friendly to dev's eg month(), day() functions whilst on Firefird is extract(dateCol, 'month'). Overall its pretty cool and has its niche. Certainly faster that m$sql 2006

Re:Firebird is nice

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL syntax might be easier, but it's also proprietary almost-SQL crap, on a database that's not exactly great (works OK for simple queries only, doesn't value data integrity, just starting to get features we've been taking for granted for ages like sprocs and transactions, poor clustering/replication, etc). It's the single worst DB I've ever tried (and it's not "free" either - it's dual licensed, pay for non-GPL stuff). If you want a better database (works, normal SQL, has the features it should, etc) at a good price e.g. always free (besides firebird), then try perhaps postgresql, or the free express editions from the big 3 vendors - it's usually sufficient for most projects. Anything beats MySQL. MySQL is to databases what VB6 is to programming. It might be easier, but it SUCKS.

And if you even were a SQL Server user, you'd know there's no such thing as MSSQL 2006, and claiming firebird is faster than MSSQL is truly laughable. I doubt you'd ever even SEEN it, much less USED it, or know anything about it.

Yeah, you have absolutely *NO* clue what you're talking about. 100% FUD.

Re:Firebird is nice

[Mondor]

"Certainly faster that m$sql 2006"

Of course, taking into account that MS SQL Server 2006 does not exists.

Slashdot editors trying to amuse us

[Salvance]

I wonder if this was posted simply to see what fun folks might have comparing the name to Firefox. I've only used Firebird once, and I wasn't a big fan (who knows, maybe 2.0 is better). I'm having a great time reading the comments though, so nice job /. editors!

Re:whatza? *bird* ?

[mashmorgan]

I end u calling it FireBase most of the time !

Re:firebird is a very poor database.

[Bourdain]

if you've seen "hacking democracy" (the hbo documentary on Diebold), you'll notice that their database is MS Access -- I'm anything but a software developer, but in my use of Access (granted Access 2000), I've seen enough inconsistent operation to be very careful about just client data for quick small analyses, let alone vote data integrity

For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird...

[crazyvas]

Firebird (sometimes called FirebirdSQL) is a relational database management system offering many ANSI SQL-99 and SQL-2003 features. It runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird was programmed and is maintained by Firebird Foundation (formerly known as FirebirdSQL Foundation). It was forked from the open sources of InterBase from Borland.
More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_se rver)

Re:firebird is a very poor database.

[flimflammer]

"if you've seen "hacking democracy" (the hbo documentary on Diebold), you'll notice that their database is MS Access -- I'm anything but a software developer, but in my use of Access (granted Access 2000), I've seen enough inconsistent operation to be very careful about just client data for quick small analyses, let alone vote data integrity"

In that documentary, I also heard the main woman attacking Diebold exclaim that "Release Notes" are a legal document that must legally show all changes made to their source code. And on top of that, the researcher who was tasked with viewing the contents of the Diebold memory card's means of looking at it was "Buying a memory card reader on the internet", where the Diebold card slid in nice and easy, and he was able to see the contents of the card plain as day (even quoted saying there are "living things" on it, referring to so-called executable code. The thing he purchased online even had the fancy words "Memory Card Reader" on it!

Obviously, don't take everything you see in an HBO Documentary to heart. Some of the topics they touched on in that documentary were true and accurate, others were ... we'll say "beefed up" to make their case look bigger/stronger.

Re:For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird.

[TheRaven64]

Firebird (sometimes called FirebirdSQL) is a relational database management system offering many ANSI SQL-99 and SQL-2003 features

So is PostgreSQL. Would anyone who has used both like to comment on relative levels of SQL support, ACID compliance, and speed on different workloads? All other things being equal, I'd take BSDL over MPL, but I'd be interested in hearing what Firebird does better than PostgreSQL (and vice versa).

Re:For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird.

[Shados]

Well, one thing: Firebird can be used in embedded scenarios

Re:What your post's syntax reminded me of

[Phil Resch]

He doesn't work for Firebird, it's an Internet cliche. It follows the standard form:

"I work for (insert company name); So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies. Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.... You don't. I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about. This is how bad info gets passed around. If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do. Cos some (insert target group) believe anything they hear."

According to this Wikipedia article on Fark.com cliches, it originated in this Fark forum thread (search for "I work for the U.S. Mint" about halfway down the page), but I've seen in take different forms in different places.

Just thought you should know.

Firbird's History

[secondhand_Buddah]

For those of you who don't know. Firebird is a fork of Borland Interbase. For a brief moment in time, Borland decided to open source Interbase, but quickly changed their minds about it. But, during the open source period, a group of developers siezed the moment, and created the fork.
Interbase has 20-25 years of development behind it (and therefore Firebird). It is stable, and used by many major corporations, including NASA, throughout the world. In terms of open source products, it probably has the MOST mature code base of ALL open source projects.
Interbase used to compete in the Oracle, Sybase marketspace, but lost considerable market share in the 1990's. What differentiates Firebird from most open source projects, is its history. Most open source databases have been built from the ground up, whereas, by the time Firbird came into existance, it already had 20-25 years of development in the source code base.

So while, the core dev team of Firebird is fairly small, poorly funded, and badly marketed, the potential still exists to turn this into a project that will compete strongly in the OSI DB arena.

Re:For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird.

[Unordained]

The big thing for me was ACID -- the damn thing has great transactional support. I still miss it now that I'm forced to work on Oracle ("serializable" mode in Oracle is nothing like real transactional support if you've been using Firebird for a while.) From everything I've read, Postgres caught up with Firebird mainly by, uh, borrowing their generational data architecture, but then somewhat surpassed it in terms of user-defined types/functions. It is still really stinkin' easy to install though, whereas my last experience installing Postgres was nothing but a nightmare. (I don't really mean that as a knock on Postgres -- I'm terrible at sysadmin-like tasks, so it's no surprise that I had trouble; rather it's amazing that Firebird was as easy as it was to install.) As far as I know, PHP always comes precompiled only with MySQL support, so both DB's require equal extra work. I used FB/C++ at my previous job (500 some-odd tables, mostly normalized), and I still use FB/PHP for personal projects (far smaller.) It's pleased me in both settings. Keywords: solid, predictable, tunable, extensible, expressive, safe, and not a freakin' fan-club hack job.

I do hear someone's been working on an oracle-compatibiliy feature for Firebird (support some of oracle's more interesting expressions), so that's a possible bonus, but I'm not clued in on the current project status. If you're in the market for better OSS databases, you might also consider SAP-DB (rebranded as MySQL's MaxDB.) Just seems like another oft-forgotten contender in that same general weight class.

Cross platform

[TrashGod]

I enjoyed using Firebird 1.5 for a small (24 table, 10,000 row) multiuser (8-12) database on Mac OS X (10.3, 10.4) and linux (RedHat 9, RedHat WS3, Debian) with the JayBird JCA/JDBC Drivers and Java. Everything worked cross-platform including declarative constraints, and the database export utility cleanly handled the endian change between PPC and x86. Firebird is an often overlooked FOSS alternative to Oracle.

Firebird vs the rest

[ras]

A seemingly unbiased speed comparison (well at least not biased towards Firebird, anyway) can be found here: http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=SpeedComparis on

As for features: it has them all. ACID, triggers, stored procedures, will maintain identical copies of the one database on two drives for you, etc, etc. Possibly because of this when I went looking for a database to replace Oracle it seemed to be the one most recommended. At least one commercial vendor has an add on that provides the one thing missing in this role: a stored procedure language compatible with Oracle's PL/SQL.

And yes, I am a happy Firebird user. But not for any of the reasons mentioned so far. I use it because it is dammed easy to bolt onto your current project. No configuration. Small footprint. Ports to anything. Zero ongoing maintenance. That is its heritage you see - it always was a bolt on library for applications that don't even mention the word SQL in their description. So Firebird is doing its job well if the end users and sysadmins aren't aware of its existence. Think about that when you are next tearing your hair out trying to set up some MYSQL database when all you wanted to do is install some tiny web app someone else in the office asked for.

And that leads us to what turns most people off. There are no flashy front ends out of the box. Is comes with three utilities of note: backup, restore and isql: all very simple command line tools. Its an embedded database - you are meant to provide the front end yourself. And the doco, while present, is patchwork of old stuff and separate "changes since ..." files.

But if you are need a backend for a application that doesn't parade its "SQL" credentials Firebird is one possibility. The others are sleepycat (for speed) and SQLLite (for simplicity). You'd be nuts to use anything else, and I wish a lot of projects out there hadn't.

Re:Firebird vs the rest

[midnighttoadstool]

The parent seems to be suggesting that Firebird is an embedded database. It isn't. Its a full-featured industrial-strength RDBMS (ie. proper concurrency etc), usually run as a daemon/service, that is nevertheless suited to embedded applications.

Firebird 1.x could scale to about 100-200 users on late 90's hardware (it wasn't so good at taking advantage of multiple cpus). Firebird 2 should go way beyond that even with the same hardware.

Re:For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird.

[larry bagina]

Installing postgresql 8.1 with windows was easy - it uses a nice standard windows installer.

PHP 5 (windows installation) includes the postgres dll (in fact it includes a dll for all supported databases). They stopped including mysql in favor of sqlite (due to changes in the mysql license and since most unix boxes already have the mysql client libraries installed).