Submitted by 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.
Firebird 2.0 Goes Gold
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Can somebody please enlighten me?
Whats so special about Firebird when compared to databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL or even SQL lite?
Edited 2006-11-13 03:26
http://www.firebirdnews.org/docs/fb2min.html
basically it’s a fully featured sql server that can be embedded. Various commercial software packages use variants of firebird or it’s commercial cousin from Borland. Veritas is the big one that I know of.
Read the link…that’s basically why you should use it over mysql…but then again mysql isn’t a competitor when it comes to true sql database engines.
The US defense force also use Interbase (parent of Firebird).
Well, I know that they’re now using Firebird in some places/systems, instead of InterBase.
MySQL – missing lots of more advanced features, but is faster.
PostgreSQL – feature parity, but not embeddable.
I’m not too familiar with Firebird, but it sounds like a pretty nice DB. It’s based on the old Borland Interbase.
Sorry…I was wrong…Veritas uses Sybase…not firebird.
It is a real pity that Firebird doesn’t get the attention it deserves compared to other open-source RDMS. It’s like an undiscovered gem! For me Firebird beats the pants off MySQL and PostgreSQL. It has more features, is rock solid and stable, is really fast, has an extremely small install footprint, is easy to manage and easy to deploy. I use it for all my commercial and open-source work.
It’s always like that. The mediocre products get all the hype, and you have to hunt to find the gems.
Actually the same is true even for music bands for example.
It’s always like that. The mediocre products get all the hype, and you have to hunt to find the gems
I wouldn’t say Postgres is a mediocre product. I couldn’t even say the same for MySQL or sqlite, as they all have their usage scenarios. Continue writing about Firebird and more people will get to know it and use it if they think is better for their projects.
Mediocre is your attitude.
Have you ever run into character set problems with MySQL? Firebird takes care of this with the use of the “NONE” charset type. Makes life easy when migrating
I think MySQL solves that in a similar way by converting to a binary data type.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-conversion.html
Does anyone know if Firebird can handle materialized views? I would love to try it out for a Business Intelligence application…….
I didn’t know what Materialized views where, so googled it. This is what I found someone else posted a few months back, so not sure if 2.0 supports it.
** Begin Quote **
I think you’ll find that materialized views, at least as far as doing refresh-on-commit and query rewriting, are a really advanced feature that only Oracle has. In many warehousing or decision support applications, they are a must have feature that makes the difference between project success and failure.
Assuming you aren’t in such a high performance setting, you can often simulate a materialized view by simply populating a transformation table using stored procedures. In such settings, I think either Firebird or PostgreSQL would work fine, cost less, and avoid icky proprietary licence restrictions.
** End Quote **
Page won’t load – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
For those who can’t wait: download it at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9028
Firefox was supposed to use Firebird name, but those guys objected. Phoenix was browser’s first name, until a BIOS manufacturer objected. Funny how a word that was spoken before even Roman Empire was born can be reserved for some US company.
Make a new Linux distribution and call it “Windows” if you dare…
I think you are getting confused with the Browser and the Database Server, but I get your point. Isn’t there a city called Phoenix in the US? I’m sure they existed before the BIOS manufacturer! 🙂
The issue there is that Phoenix (the BIOS people) don’t want to be associated with Phoenix (the browser), since they are in somewhat close markets. Phoenix would probably send a mildly volatile cake to the Mozilla team if they got pelted with calls for support for Mozilla Phoenix.
Also, under trademark law, you have to defend your trademark or cede control of it. See Debian IceWeasel.
Actually, that’s part of it. The big reason they thought it’d get confused was they had a browser embedded in the BIOS they were testing at that point, thereby making them in the same “market” and had to defend it. Phoenix the BIOS manufacturer had a pretty cool embedded thing going. Since it wasn’t exactly publicized, I doubt any of the FF crew knew about it when choosing their name.
It was nice that, for a change, there wasn’t much ruckus about the whole “it’s my name” deal.
I wouldn’t turn back. When I evaluated a database engine for a medium size financial website three years ago, I came upon Firebird. I have experience and manage very large traffic sites that use mysql or Oracle, but I wanted open source, and I needed views, stored procedures and triggers (in the day of mysql 4). Firebird provided all that and much much more. As added bonus, Firebird’s stored procedure language is quite similar to Oracle, rendering a hypothetical future migration reasonably easy. I am extremely impressed with Firebird’s features, performance and stability. I would only take the mysql road for a very high-volume mostly read-only application.
you can download and read the news about this release from an official alternate site (ibphoenix)
http://www.ibphoenix.com/
ps: firebirdsql.org was hit by slashdot , sorry for that
When I was evaluating database engines last year, I came across Firebird. For the project I was working on, it won out because it was an embeddable database engine that had small footprint and full feature set. Another advantage is that it is scalable, so that the data files for the embedded version also will work for the full version.
We have had no problems with performance or stability.
As callix mentioned, it has a powerful stored procedure language, although in 1.5 there are some quirks that require workarounds. These issues seem to have been mostly addressed in the new 2.0. I’m looking forward to upgrading my project to the new version 2.0.
Random thoughts:
Well Firebird is a solid database compared to other open source databases. Firebird team forked it from original Interbase so features wise they already had a big advantage compared to MySql or PostGreSql…so in order to be successful all they needed to do was create good documentation, tutorials, search engine friendly forums/newsgroups and marketing. The new users or people evaluating Firebird did reminded of lack of documentation/tutorials etc frequently but there new documentation project seems to be sluggish. And its not in the style php.net or macromedia doc’s site which allows user comments. There yahoo groups based supports mailing list is very good, but not everyone uses a nntp clients…some isp’s don’t provide it with basic connection. One of there lead recently joined MySql to help mysql in the areas of transactions support etc. There is only one (in english) Firebird book available written by one of the Firebird senior team member and hence lack of good documentation/tutorials on firebird site (just like when jboss project started they didn’t provide much doc’s on site, I guess here also the business model is same). Firebird is more popular in Brazil and Russia.
A year back there was only one single person developing and maintaining java jdbc driver for Firebird.
In mean time Mysql came out with mysql 4.1.x and mysql 5.x versions basically caught up with there new competition. Mysql added the Foreign keys, stored procedure, sub-queries, triggers etc while Firebird people were still trying to publish there long awaited book and cd’s. Also during this time Postgresql came out with windows native port giving firebird serious competition.
Using and migrating to Firebird is easier for someone who is a seasoned enterprise database guy.