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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."
Now I can finally convince my friends to upgrade their web browser from Firebird 0.6 :)
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.
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.
Thunderfox
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
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.
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...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
"Thunderfox"
Ice Weasel!
Alright, alright, I'm going, I'm going...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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
"and I don't know of any that support Firebird." Its the other -9%.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
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
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.e rver)
More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_s
"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"
... we'll say "beefed up" to make their case look bigger/stronger.
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
Firefox, Thunderbird, Firebird... I'm confused
I think it's a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Well, one thing: Firebird can be used in embedded scenarios
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.
:D
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.
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.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
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.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
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.
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
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
> 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.
My other Sig is very funny.
Hi, to use the app via Terminal Services the solution is to prefix IpcName in firebird.conf with
"Global\" (without quotes).
regards,