July 24, 2006
Firebird, nee Interbase
Apparently, Interbase has morphed into Firebird. Interbase was an early RDBMS, owned by Borland, occasionally touted as the next great DBMS contender, and early to be open-sourced. That’s about as much as I remember about it. There were a couple of features on which it was earlier than the big boys — BLOBs, maybe? — but I imagine that’s very old news by now. And indeed the product doesn’t seem to be terribly up to date at this point.
So are there any Firebird partisans out there who’d like to tell me what’s so great about Firebird? Thanks in advance, and I’m especially grateful for the flame-free nature of your expected contribution.
Categories: Open source
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5 Responses to “Firebird, nee Interbase”
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Firebird is a fork of InterBase 6.0 Open Edition. InterBase continues to be developed as a commercial product (http://www.borland.com/interbase/). For a fast overview of why InterBase is significant, see this article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterBase
InterBase has been updated significantly in the past few years, but Borland no longer does Open Source releases. Firebird is quite different from InterBase at this point.
some of the modern features will be implemented in 2.0 release , other in the 3.0
here are some of the replies to that article (is just an rant by the way – the reality is looking better for firebird )
http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=566
You can check most of the highlights of Firebird looking at the paper “Got to know Firebird in 2 minutes” available at http://www.firebirdnews.org/docs/fb2min.html.
Another paper to check: http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_enterprise_firebird
IMHO, most enjoying feature of Firebird is its architecture (MGA). It simplifies things much vs other way (locking). Combining this with triggers and SP’s you can do a lot of things in Firebird with ease. So it is simple, easy to use, has small footprint and low resource requirements. Needs minimal administration: install and forget it, it just works. May be not suitable for big enterprise in its current state but it can easily handle 100+ simultaneous clients on LAN environment (with a low-end server)
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