“If you are reading this paper, this is probably your first encounter with the Firebird RDBMS. This paper will present to you the main features of the Firebird database. At the end, I am sure you will be anxious to download its lightweight installer and try it out yourself.”
I hate to admit this, but the first time I ever heard about the Firebird RDBMS was back when they changed the name of the Mozilla browser to Firebird, and then subsequently to Firefox.
Thanks for the link.
I take it that you refer to Phoenix, not Mozilla. Although Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox comes from Mozilla, it is not the old Mozilla browser.
I wonder how long it will be before the usual shopping list of “Firebird vs MySQL vs Postgres” appears.
I’ve been forced to use Interbase and Firebird over the last 5 or 6 years due to my various Employer’s preferences. I’ve also used SQL Server and Oracle in that time.
My take is this: Firebird is a very nice database. It’s a little too grass roots for my liking, and it could do with more built in support for some of the non standard SQL dialect features that make life simpler. If I had a preference, I would choose a big business back end every time though. Being cheap or even open source is a nice badge, but if your customer is paying you to support the product you deliver, and you have to debug the RDMS yourself, that kinds or scares me. I also resent having to pay for support from a third party. I like to curse at the guy on the support line for the product I’m using, not some some who is a third party and might not even be in contact with the owner of the bug. I know that’s a very personal view, but it’s not unrealistic.
Yea companies like “big business back end” solutions because they have someone to sue if something goes wrong. For example for source control we use Rational ClearCase even though all of us devs prefer CVS. It costs something like $6000 per seat per year for ClearCase but if we chose to use CVS and something got screwed up theres no one to sue.
If you are planning on Firebird use, please take Firebird2 version even that its beta release. My experience is FB1 should be forgotten unless you really can evaluate your needs througly.
FB1 is a rather limited db engine in year 2006+ compared to what Mysql and Postresql can offer. But FB2 has made some pretty good progress. But still I want to see:
* more preinstalled sql functions without userdefined (non-portable) dll libraries
* more syntax sugar to support defactos created by the big players (MSSQL, MySQL) to give better transition path from one engine to FB engine
* transparent batch query support through jdbc driver. Like in MSSQL, where I can run even TSQL code without procedures like it was a simple query. Then return a resultset from the given script query.
* better support to return arbitraty and temporary resultsets from stored procedure
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Doesn’t Firebird have an oracle compatibility module that gives it PL-SQL capability? I would think this would give it a fair amount of SQL features.
Yes, the Oracle mode module does PL/SQL and covers most Oracle SQL features. You can read a presentation about it here:
http://www.janus-software.com/fyracle.pdf