Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 21, 2004 06:35 PM
The article is OK, but seems to damn Firebird with faint praise - whilst even Berkely db gets its own separate evaluation, all that's said about Firebird is this:
"Compare the failure of both Borland's Interbase and SAP's SAP-DB as open source projects -- no offense to Firebird DB, which became a dynamic project after they forked it away from Borland. "
That is just poor reporting. The article implies that Firebird is some "also-ran" open source project that was narrowly saved from extinction.
Firebird is a great db and can certainly stand comparison with Cloudscape, PostgreSQL and Ingres.
It is as featureful as any of those three. It has a 20 year history (as InterBase). It has a small footprint (embeddable) and is available on many different platforms (Win32, OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP UX). There are probably more client tools available for Firebird than for all the other open source databases combined. And compared to beasts like Oracle, the administration and maintenance of Firebird is a breeze (IBM is only just waking up to 'autonomic' databases, whilst from its inception InterBase and Firebird aimed at this).
And just to show that I am not so some savant in recognizing the value of Firebird....
In 2004 Firebird/InterBase won the O'Reilly database poll (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/pq/46).
Even on Newsforge's own poll in December 2004, Firebird is the outstanding leader with 1638 votes to runner-up MySQL with 472 votes (http://www.newsforge.com/pollBooth.pl?qid=54&aid<nobr>=<wbr></nobr> -1).
Looks to me like the writer of this article is not aware of the massive surge in popularity and recognition that Firebird has received in the last two or three years. And all this despite the fact that even now a Google search on Firebird will still bring up more hits for the mis-named Mozilla browser than it will bring up for the database (and this situation was even worse in the past year).
Every developer in need of a database owes it to themself to consider Firebird. IBM gave me multiple copies of DB2 when I bought some other IBM software. I still have those unused licenses, becase DB2 does not offer me any more than Firebird (and would be a damn sight harder to install, use and maintain).
While you are there you can have a look at the range of administration and development tools available (http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&pa<nobr>g<wbr></nobr> e=ibp_contrib_download).
I have no connection with IBPhoenix, or the Firebird development team. I am just a developer building a website using Firebird as the distributed database.
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Firebird Evaluation
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 21, 2004 06:35 PMThe article is OK, but seems to damn Firebird with faint praise - whilst even Berkely db gets its own separate evaluation, all that's said about Firebird is this:
"Compare the failure of both Borland's Interbase and SAP's SAP-DB as open source projects -- no offense to Firebird DB, which became a dynamic project after they forked it away from Borland. "
That is just poor reporting. The article implies that Firebird is some "also-ran" open source project that was narrowly saved from extinction.
Firebird is a great db and can certainly stand comparison with Cloudscape, PostgreSQL and Ingres.
It is as featureful as any of those three. It has a 20 year history (as InterBase). It has a small footprint (embeddable) and is available on many different platforms (Win32, OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP UX). There are probably more client tools available for Firebird than for all the other open source databases combined. And compared to beasts like Oracle, the administration and maintenance of Firebird is a breeze (IBM is only just waking up to 'autonomic' databases, whilst from its inception InterBase and Firebird aimed at this).
And just to show that I am not so some savant in recognizing the value of Firebird....
In 2004 Firebird/InterBase won the O'Reilly database poll (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/pq/46).
In 2003 it came neck and neck with MySQL, the winner of the Database of the Year Poll (403 votes vs 405 - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthrea<nobr>d<wbr></nobr> .php?s=&threadid=116360).
Even on Newsforge's own poll in December 2004, Firebird is the outstanding leader with 1638 votes to runner-up MySQL with 472 votes (http://www.newsforge.com/pollBooth.pl?qid=54&aid<nobr>=<wbr></nobr> -1).
Looks to me like the writer of this article is not aware of the massive surge in popularity and recognition that Firebird has received in the last two or three years. And all this despite the fact that even now a Google search on Firebird will still bring up more hits for the mis-named Mozilla browser than it will bring up for the database (and this situation was even worse in the past year).
Every developer in need of a database owes it to themself to consider Firebird. IBM gave me multiple copies of DB2 when I bought some other IBM software. I still have those unused licenses, becase DB2 does not offer me any more than Firebird (and would be a damn sight harder to install, use and maintain).
An excellent 1000+ page book on Firebird was recently published (you can get a copy from IBPhoenix and help support Firebird: http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1<nobr>1<wbr></nobr> 03619236:513792&page=ibp_firebird_book).
While you are there you can have a look at the range of administration and development tools available (http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&pa<nobr>g<wbr></nobr> e=ibp_contrib_download).
I have no connection with IBPhoenix, or the Firebird development team. I am just a developer building a website using Firebird as the distributed database.
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