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