Firebird 2.1 Released
Firebird News just announced the release of Firebird 2.1.
We’ve been using Firebird as infovark’s SQL database for several months now. It’s an open source fork of Borland’s InterBase SQL server. So far, we’ve been extremely impressed by the database itself. Its companion database administration tool, FlameRobin, is shaping up nicely too. It’s currently in version 0.86, but it handles most of what we need.
Why did we choose Firebird? I’ve worked with a variety of databases during my career, including Microsoft’s SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL. While we were strongly tempted use one of those, none of them met our criteria. We needed an embeddable, scalable, ANSI-compliant database that we could deploy easily. It also had to have liberal licensing arrangements and low (or no) royalties. That limited our available choices.
Two features persuaded us to give Firebird a try: It was free to use and the entire database is contained within a single file. I’m glad we did; it’s absolutely the right choice for us.
I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, however. If you haven’t done much work with relational databases, Firebird is not the place to start. While the Firebird community is working on documentation and tools, they’re far behind what you’ll find at a commercial vendor or some other open source products. The Firebird website is tricky to navigate and lacks a search feature. Trying to get pointers from Google is tough, too, due to a certain American muscle car with the same name. (Tip: Search for Firebird SQL to get the database.) You’ll most likely need to rely on a combination of the Firebird website, InterBase documentation, and developer blogs to get specific information.
If you can look past those issues — and they’re common ones in the open source space — you’ll find FIrebird to be a solid database for development across a variety of platforms.
But keep Lorenzo Alberton’s cheat sheet handy, and bookmark Stefan Heymann’s reference site.
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Nice entry.
We are using FB too for our products.
No problems as for now, and we are glad we chose it.
Yes, website is indeed very tricky and difficult to find information in it
I totally agree about the documentation issues. Helen Borrie’s book is definitely a requirement and not optional for using Firebird. When that came out it made things so much better. I’m not presently using Firebird for anything but still a fan of it.
@Rob: Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to check out the book. Here’s the link for others that might be interested:
http://www.amazon.com/Firebird-Book-Reference-Database-Developers/dp/1590592794