The Firebird Project announces the release of Firebird V1.5.1. this relese represents a committment by the project to develop and deliver ongoing improvements to this popular open source database engine.The NPTL (Native Posix Thread Library) Linux builds referred to in the release notes will be available shortly.
Changes from previous version:
This release adds a charset improvement, allowing use of NONE as a fully transparent charset everywhere. (Changes were made in the engine to make the character set NONE more friendly about reading / writing data from and to fields of another character set.)
It adds the config-driven ability to abort a server process in the case of bugchecks or structured exceptions (to produce a core dump).
Firebird Superserver has a link-time backward compatibility issue with the NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) that may cause it to be unstable on Linux distributions that enable the NPTL in the GNU C.The new NPTL builds of Superserver should solve these problems.
Does anyone use Firebird? Not trying to Troll, but I don’t want to use something that isn’t in the mainstream for any professional work I do. Maybe I’ll play around with it in my spare time, but I’d like to know about any success or failure stories surrounding it.
Hello Bill:
Firebird is based on the Interbase RDBS (now owned by Borland). So… it has, indirectly, been in use for quite a few years (maybe 10) before Firebird came along.
However, specific examples of Firebird and Interbase use can be found here:
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1090262363:49599&pa…
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1090262363:49599&pa…
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1090262363:49599&pa…
These links were pulled from the sidebar of this link:
http://www.ibphoenix.com/
Enjoy,
Michael
i uset it extensively in large projects , it suits its purpouses , in applications where database server speed is not the main issue.
i find it verry close to sql standards and also with modern addons.
mostly i use it in combination with mysql server using phpadodb and jdbc for my cfm projects.
In my experience it is a great tool for several things:
– Learn RDB concepts like domains, transactions, foreign keys, contraints, etc. This applies to any RDBM, but this is extremely easy t install and administer.
– Really put in practice RDB concepts in a real Database. It’s SQL support is extensive (hello MySQL!) and it’s transactional model is quite similar to the SQL standar (not the MS-SQL / Sybase model).
– It just works and does the job. People use it in production with several users. It probably is slower than a fine tuned oracle or MS-SQL Server, but I can assure you it will be faster and easier to use than any of those out of the box. Big dabatases have tons of settings to fine tune the DB engine and many are specific to certain setups. FirebirdSQL has just 1 setting (the page size) and that is all there is to it. Any casual admin can get better perfomance on a FB installation than in an Oracle.
I have used it on several large projects, but have recently moved away from it in favor of Postgresql.
Postgresql is just miles away better, it has temp table support and it does not have the notion of PSQL or DSQL
On firebird there is only certain SQL you can use in procedures, but Postgres does not have these limitations.
Also the firebird project has seemed to slack off lately and some of the developers/tech writers are just downright nasty….JS and HB
care to expound on this claim?
firebird is good…but i’m also waiting for the native windows port of pgsql…and then we’ll have all these superior competitors to mysql!
>firebird is good…but i’m also waiting for the native
>windows port of pgsql…and then we’ll have all these
>superior competitors to mysql!
There’s already a native port for Postgresql called UltraSQL which is distributed by NuSphere. I’m not sure if the Postgresql-based rdbms distributed by Fujitsu has a Windows port available. Both ain’t freely available though (free as in free speech and free beer).
If featuritis is a major consideration, there’s also MySQL’s MaxDB in the game…
I agree with “Postgres”.
The keepers of the public Interbase release have some issues to handle.
If you have any issues about perfomance (like select count(*) from somewhere (full table scan in fb), or similar); the answer you get from the forums is; “add more hardware” or “knowing the number of records violates with the relational model…”.
Fancy words — propably rigth thing to assume(kinda) — but, as a systems developer; I don’t accept answers like that!
Don’t tell me to add with hardware; IBM does it all the time!
The license, which on, FB is relesed, is great (I still tell my customers to install it), nevertheless; I will let FB go when PostgreSQL has a stable, native, win32 port (7.5 + 7.5.1?).
It is really too sad that the FB gang got their elitists bragging about that FB is a “non DBA database server” — and at the same time telling us that “you cannot change the meta-data unless you have “single connect to the database” (non DBA?)
Do you have a lot of changes to your fb-database? Back-up and restore your database every night (non DBA?).
You have no choise of where-ever you store your data, where youre indexes are located or what kind of index you want (want bitmap-indexes? no way!).
I guess this used to be ok, but no more.
I’ll stick to use FB (still; I like the license) for small databases like a couple of hundred GB and a couple of dozen tables. But for more serious business; I’ll wait for PostgreSQL to support the platforms I need.
It’s really too bad that only a handful of individuals stops a great dbms to evolve.
Besides that; Borland released the code for Interbase (the sources that FB is trying to evolve from) in 2000 (or was it 1999?), and they semm to try to let the platform to evolve.
My guess for my customers in the future is (need a multiplatform dbms with perfomance and acid support) that; until PostgreSQL is available for my Win32 customers; I’ll keep up with FB. When the indexing gets important (believe me; it will sooner than you think) in larger projects I’ll have to wait to test PostgreSQL or stick to Oracle, MSSQL or what ever.
Before you decide to use FB; Take a look at the FB-support/dev forums; you’ll be suprised of how they ignore the way SQL actually is being used in real life. If you have a question suggesting that “Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, PostreSQL, DB2, Gupta and what ever” handles indexing or what ever in a similar, reliable sort of way the answer you’ll get is; “Won’t do that!”.
There used to be a fork of the public Interbase sources (don’t remember the name…). I guess that the fork existed just because changes where impossible unless you were from the “core team”. The problem — today — is that the fork merged into FB (giving the forkers a membership in the “core team”).
The best thing for the old Interbase-sources must be that somebody creates a branch from FB 1.5.1, or maybe the 2.0 head-branch, and continue from there….
It sounds like they all at least are compedative which is a good thing.
Firebird is new so it will be good to have more good options.
Firebird website is ugly.
They should have a web based Forum similar to phpbb or maybe google groups 2. Their current yahoo-groups based list is hard inconvenient for searching.
They need to convert all .pdf docs to .html format.
Are there any comparative performance benchmarks available which would show Firebird performance against posgresql, mysql etc.
Please explain in what way do JS/HB “stop FB to evolve”?
I agree that the Yahoogroups web interface is such a PITA for searching (kind of ironic since Yahoo wants to take on Google for searching). But I think there’s a couple of searchable archive out there for FB lists.
I downloaded Firebird and tried to install it. Unfortunately I could not find any Linux install documenation bundled with the software. MySQL and Postgres have great install and usage documentation that comes in the tarball. Even on the Firebird site I could only find Redhat specific install instructions.
some links with documentation (starting howtos)
http://ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_quickstart
http://ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_firebird_on_linu…
Some of the people on the FB admin list are just mean, you ask questions or give some ideas and they either make you look stupid or just flame you.
Postgres is just way better here are some more stupid things about FB.
Dialects: who needs them, it’s a pain in the ass to have to specify Dialect 3 all the time.
database paths: you have to explicitly specify where your FDB file is or create a alias.
You can’t do lots of SQL in stored procs like create table or create user there is specific SQL you can only do in procs (PSQL) etc etc
With postgres you can do all the same kind of sub queries in select statements you can do in other propriatary DBs.
No temp table support, and the list could go on and on
FB is a good general purpose DB, but that is all.