Firebird

For the browser Mozilla FirebirdSee Mozilla Firefox

Firebird is an open source relational database management system (or RDBMS) (Query Language: SQL), based on version 6 of Interbase, whose code was released by Borland in 2000. His code was rewritten from C to C++. The project is actively developed, on April 18, 2008 version 2.1 was released and on December 26, 2009 version 2.5.0 RC1 was released. Version 2.5.6, the latest in the 2.5 series, was released on July 4, 2016. Version 3.0 was released on April 19, 2016.

Firebird SQL Foundation

The goals of the FirebirdSQL Foundation are:

• Support and achieve the advance of the Firebird relationship database handler
• Provide non-commercial mechanisms and infrastructure to accept and manage the funds collected, and invest such funds to promote the development effort of this database
• Promote the cooperation and affiliation of individuals, non-profit organizations and commercial companies involved or who are planning to be involved in the development, support and promotion of Firebird software projects and their associated products and activities.

History

In the late 1990s, Borland decided to release the Interbase code. Various members of the staff created a new company called IBPhoenix, and together with other independent developers, created the fork now known as Firebird. Borland would later decide to re-privatize Interbase and commercialize its licenses. However, Firebird remains an open source project under a license similar to the MPL (Mozilla Public License).

Features

• It is multi-platform, and can currently be run on operating systems: Linux, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Mac OS, Solaris and Microsoft Windows.
• Small executable, with low hardware requirements.
• Client/Server Architecture on TCP/IP protocol and others (embedded).
• Support for ACID transactions and foreign keys.
• It's medium-sized.
• Good user-based security.
• Different architectures, including the Embedded Server (embedded server) that allows to run monouser applications on computers without installing Firebird software.
• Reading-only databases, for applications that run from unwritten devices such as CD-ROM.
• Existence of ODBC, OLEDB, JDBC, PHP, Perl,.net, etc.
• Low management requirements, being considered as a maintenance-free database, apart from backup.
• Full support of the SQL-92 standard, both syntax and data types.
• Complete language for writing triggers and stored procedures called PSQL.
• Capacity to store BLOB elements (Binary Large OBjects).
• User-Defined Functions Support (UDFs).
• Autoexecutable version, without installation, excellent for creating catalogs on CD-ROM and for creating evaluation versions of some applications.

Server Types

There are two types of Firebird servers to be installed: Classic and Super server. Although they have several minor differences from each other, the main one is that the super server manages individual threads for each connection. Therefore, for a reduced number of connections, the recommended one would be the classic one because it will consume fewer resources.

In case of SMP architectures, the classic server should be used because the Supersever does not support this type of architecture.

The Firebird developers themselves recommend the following when deciding on one of these servers:

• On Windows platforms select the Superserver.
• In Linux simply choose any, according to the estimated connections. In most situations there will be no difference in implementation.

A third type could be considered, the Embedded. This consists of a single dynamic link library DLL (about 2 MB in size) that contains the entire server. In this way, a complete DBMS can be made available and distributable together with user applications without requiring it to be installed separately.

Name clash with Mozilla Firefox

In April 2003, the Mozilla Foundation decided to rename its web browser from Phoenix to Firebird. This decision caused great concern in regards to the Firebird database project, since it was assumed that users would be confused between the database and the Web browser because they would have the same name. The dispute continued until the Mozilla developers signed a statement making it clear that the name Firebird was actually Mozilla Firebird. The record also made it clear that the name Mozilla Firebird was the project's code name. On February 9, 2004, Mozilla renamed its browser as Mozilla Firefox, in order to avoid any confusion.

Goals

Because the original project does not adequately take advantage of multi-processor machines or SMP, it is expected that after the stabilization of version 2 it will be integrated with the Vulcan project (a development branch born from Firebird), adding support for this feature, thus launching version of Firebird 3.0.