“Major corporations like Boeing, Lockheed and Motorola were InterBase users, so we’ve got the track record,” Helen Borrie told LinuxInsider. “It’s very satisfying to learn of yet another big corporation or enterprise product that has switched to Firebird, and, as the word gets out, it happens more often.“
Beyond Proprietary Databases: Helen Borrie on the Future of Firebird
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Eugenia Loli
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Anyone thinking about using a database should look at kdb (www.kx.com) It is an amazing! database that already has a variant of SQL-99 and is much easier to install and maintain than any other DB I have worked with.
If you write a post, let me know what you email addy is (obscure it so spammers won’t get to you) and I’ll talk to you about it one on one.
The best point of reference is
http://kx.com/a/kdb/document/
and before the naysayers start asking who would use such a thing, look at their customer list.
http://www.kx.com/customers.htm
Arthur Whitney’s (the developer of kdb) bio:
Prior to founding Kx, Mr. Whitney was a Managing Director of Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in New York, where he led an internal team that developed global trading and risk management systems using the k language. Earlier, Mr. Whitney was at Morgan Stanley, where he developed the A+ programming language, used to build trading systems, databases and analytics for equities and fixed income. Mr. Whitney studied set theory, foundations and computational complexity at the University of Toronto and Stanford. Read his interview on the design of programming languages.
This above blurb is from.
http://kx.com/about_kx/about_kx_management.htm
can be found in this ( http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/14/22741/791 ) entry @ K5.
it sure seems like it to me.
maybe im wrong.
but astroturfing should be subtle and not so marketing hype driven
Is this ‘K’ thing a joke? My bowels spilled their contents when I saw this:
http://www.kx.com/a/k/examples/xml.k
http://www.kx.com/a/k/examples/xhtml.k
thanks for posting this article, I’d heard of mySQL and PostgreSQL, of course, but this is a new one. I vaguely remember Borland Interbase, but had no idea it had morphed to open-source.
http://www.firebirdsql.org has some confusing history pages with loads of out-of-date links. But I’m still not sure why Borland open-sourced them. Was it just because Borland had lost interest and no longer cared?
In any case, best of luck and hope they have continued success.
“www.firebirdsql.org has some confusing history pages with loads of out-of-date links. But I’m still not sure why Borland open-sourced them. Was it just because Borland had lost interest and no longer cared? ”
nope. same as the reason for CA to open source ingris. to gain market share
“same as the reason for CA to open source ingris. to gain market share”
So the idea is to get users to try the free fork, and hope
they like it, but at the same time they’re disatisfied and pay money to switch to Borland’s proprietary version?
does that sort of thing really work? I don’t think Borland is going to accept money to support Firebird, since it IS forked into a somewhat different animal.
I mean, it’s 30% faster than Interbase, sometimes much more than that.
Interbase 7 has support for multiple CPUs, but that comes at a cost!
And as the Madam said, you can access it from anywhere! And it runs anywhere!
You, dear reader, can use it, if you care enough to learn it a nd find a host that supports it 🙂
Three cheers for Firebird.
Actually, IB7 has some nice features that FB currently doesn’t, three of which are longer index length (very important for some users), vacuum/garbage collection not impacting performance too much, and the ability to monitor queries/users. FB is so black-box-y right now I feel uncomfortable using it for multiple users.
Never heard of Firebird? Where have you been? 🙂 Interbase 6.0 (the embryo of Firebird) was opensourced years ago (1998-1999 I think). Then there’s the controversy of Borland balking and reclosing Interbase, giving birth to the Firebird project. Then there’s the much publicized Firebird vs Mozilla naming dispute, ending with Mozilla renaming their browser project to Firefox.
Before anything else, I can smell fear…
))
“Actually, IB7 has some nice features that FB currently doesn’t, three of which are longer index length (very important for some users),”
And as sure as hell, FB 1.5 has features that IB7 doesn’t. I’m just too lazy to search for them…
“vacuum/garbage collection not impacting performance too much, and the ability to monitor queries/users.”
IB has always been self-maintaining (doesn’t need an administrator), at least compared to other databases. So, I don’t see something to be proud of there. But I do see that IB7 ships without the tools to halt the queries, which can be downloaded from a TeamB developer, I think.
“FB is so black-box-y right now I feel uncomfortable using it for multiple users.”
Fear…
So, IB before version 7 was unusable for you?
But that’s ok. At my work I use IB7 as well. FB 1.5 came too late to the game.
the firebirdsql.org web site hasn’t changed for quite some time. is this a testament to the stability (and bug-free operation) of the firebird v1.5 final release, or does this mean that development has ground to a halt?
i’ve only played a bit with the v1.5 final release (and the MANY release candidates before that) but haven’t tried it in production yet…
If you had read the interview, you would have known that they are currently working on FB2.
And about the suddenly lack of releases, I am thankful for that, as it seems FB1.5 took it time to get ready.
So, IB before version 7 was unusable for you?
I used IB6 and FB1.5 for a couple of small projects. I now basically use PostgreSQL exclusively, primarily due to lack of Ruby driver. Also, PostgreSQL has a lot of nice things that got me hooked.
Of course, I still use MySQL, for web forums, etc. but that’s rather different.
I love Ruby as well. And I use ODBC to connect to whatever database I need. It’s not perfect, but nothing is!
I have a Ruby site, but it’s in Portuguese: http://www.geocities.com/canalruby
That’s great. Keep up the great work 🙂
They got the person who DESIGNED interbase working on a multiprocessor version. Can’t wait to see the results….. I really like this database. Go firebird team…..