Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981. Firebird is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (once known as Borland Software Corp) under the InterBase Public License v.1.0 on 25 July, 2000. Version 1.0 of Firebird was released just yesterday for many platforms including MacOSX and Linux.
Firebird 1.0 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That could be interesting if it’s so …
We need an engineer…
To port it to (Open)BeOS
I played with firebird RC1 on win32. I’m no DBA but it did seem quite good. Actually, I can’t think of many other OSS databases available for win32… anyone know of some?
> Actually, I can’t think of many other OSS databases
> available for win32… anyone know of some?
How about MySQL?
PostgreSQL.
Eugenia,
When Dale Fuller took over, he changed the name back to Borland Software Corp. Thank GOD.
:-).
I am going to be setting up a very simple in structure but potentially large in # of entries database soon. I want it to work on both Windows and *nix. Even MySQL seems a bit overdoing it – does anyone know how Firebird compares with MySQL in this department.?. My other option would be to keep multiple flat file, spreadsheet-like, tables in CSV format and just query them using Python or some other high level language.
Drongo –
I don’t know about Firebird, but it sounds like MySQL will work fine for what you’re doing. I’ve pumped many gig of log files through MySQL, and the speed is amazing.
I would qualify my MySQL recommendation only if you will have many users and many updates for this database. MySQL doesn’t support record locking (yet) and locks the entire table when it needs to. For this schemario I’d use PostgreSQL.
Actually the record locking is not an issue at all. Access by all but a very select group of users will be read only. I looked around the web after my first post and found, for the first time, Linux Directory at http://www.linux-directory.com/. Their database list included two intriguing-sounding alternatives:
1.) SQLite at http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/
2.) mSQL at http://www.hughes.com.au/products/msql/
But your basic point is well taken. MySQL is light weight enough that it is not necessary to get any “lighter”.
MySQL + InnoDB = super fast + lightweight + transactions + row level locking + a lot more.
This couple can beat pricy ones, it is up to you and your otimizations 😉