I didn’t set out to buy a SQL IDE three months ago, but I bought Firebird Maestro from the SQL Maestro group anyway.
What I was actually looking for was an equivalent to Red Gate‘s SQL Packager for the Firebird database. SQL Packager is a useful application that makes it easy to package and deploy database schema upgrades. Sadly, all of Red Gate’s tools are for Microsoft SQL Server only.
My next step was to look through the list of admin tools on the Firebird website. And while there’s a huge selection of tools available for Firebird, I couldn’t find anything that would help me deploy schema and data upgrades. It was a bit surprising, actually, since one of Firebird’s strengths is how easy it is to embed inside other software applications. (If I’ve missed an application that can do this, please let me know!)
During the course of my investigations, I downloaded several different tools for managing Firebird. I’m a fan of the fast and free FlameRobin, but it’s still in development and doesn’t do everything I need. Sometimes a full-featured IDE is required, and I found two that fit the profile.
The first was SQL Studio from EMS Database Management Solutions. I appreciated their customer support and the breadth of features. But ultimately, I decided upon Firebird Maestro. The differences between the two IDEs were small, but Firebird Maestro had a better tool for producing database diagrams. Since Infovark has developers working halfway around the world from each other, having a good database diagram to reference is a must. Firebird Maestro also had a simple wizard for scripting out the schema and data into a single file. We put this text file into Subversion so that we have our database structure under version control.
Firebird Maestro
It won’t help me deploy an update, but I’ve had to do that sort of thing by hand before, and I suppose I can do it again. But sometimes when you look for something you find something else just as good.
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.