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."

Huh?

[Senjutsu]

Firefox, Thunderbird, Firebird...

I'm confused.

It is a database people

[IntelliAdmin]

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 [windows-admin-tools.com]

Re:How does this compare?

[Shados]

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.

Firebird is nice

[mashmorgan]

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

Re:Huh?

[astrosmash]

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.

For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird...

[crazyvas]

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.
More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_se rver) [wikipedia.org]

Re:firebird is a very poor database.

[flimflammer]

"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"

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'll say "beefed up" to make their case look bigger/stronger.

Re:Huh?

[KarmaMB84]

EFI is the newest incompatible BIOS replacement.

Re:How does this compare?

[jozeph78]

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.

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. :D

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.

Re:Really cool but...

[ninjaz]

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.

I think it is mostly due to historical reasons, and because MySQL hangs out in the sweet spot for many uses. I started using MySQL in 1997. In 1997, the only free SQL databases around for skunkworks projects were MySQL and miniSQL, version 1 of which had a single-threaded engine making it unusable for multi-user applications like anything on the web, and its version 2 would returned random query results due to some persistent bug. Even PostgreSQL was looking unmaintained and wasn't a viable option.

At the same time, Linux, Free Software and web applications started taking off, so everyone started using it on Linux for SQL work since it was the only reasonable choice. Of course, once Linux became popular and corporate managers found out their companies used it, the big database vendors ended up porting, too, but MySQL had already gained its fame and was a free download.

Now that PostgreSQL and Firebird are around, I am pleased to see free software applications getting compatibility.

For what it's worth, working with MySQL has put quite a few loaves of bread on my table. ;) (along with Oracle, DB2, Sybase, PostgreSQL...)

Firbird's History

[secondhand_Buddah]

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.

Cross platform

[TrashGod]

I enjoyed using Firebird 1.5 for a small (24 table, 10,000 row) multiuser (8-12) database on Mac OS X (10.3, 10.4) and linux (RedHat 9, RedHat WS3, Debian) with the JayBird JCA/JDBC Drivers and Java. Everything worked cross-platform including declarative constraints, and the database export utility cleanly handled the endian change between PPC and x86. Firebird is an often overlooked FOSS alternative to Oracle.

Re:For those of you who haven't heard of Firebird.

[larry bagina]

Installing postgresql 8.1 with windows was easy - it uses a nice standard windows installer.

PHP 5 (windows installation) includes the postgres dll (in fact it includes a dll for all supported databases). They stopped including mysql in favor of sqlite (due to changes in the mysql license and since most unix boxes already have the mysql client libraries installed).

Re:How does this compare?

[flurdy]

> 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.

Re:How does this compare?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, to use the app via Terminal Services the solution is to prefix IpcName in firebird.conf with
"Global\" (without quotes).

regards,

Re:Firebird vs the rest

[midnighttoadstool]

The parent seems to be suggesting that Firebird is an embedded database. It isn't. Its a full-featured industrial-strength RDBMS (ie. proper concurrency etc), usually run as a daemon/service, that is nevertheless suited to embedded applications.

Firebird 1.x could scale to about 100-200 users on late 90's hardware (it wasn't so good at taking advantage of multiple cpus). Firebird 2 should go way beyond that even with the same hardware.