Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 23, 2004 12:15 AM
I was not criticising the PostgreSQL developer quoted - I was criticising the journalism in the article.
The article covers all the other major open-source dbs in roughly the same amount of detail, but only makes an allusion to Firebird by quoting that developer. The only reference to Firebird in that article is "no offense to Firebird DB, which became a dynamic project" - which does not convey any information about Firebird except to make it look like some kind of weak also-ran compared to the other DBs mentioned.
The polls suggest that it is other open-source DBs which are the also-rans... Also, by failing to say that Borland have continued to develop and invest in InterBase, the article implies that Borland abandoned InterBase once Firebird forked off from it. But my understanding is that Borland had a change of heart after opening up InterBase and decided that it was too valuable/lucrative to relinquish the revenue stream (unlike several of the other open-source DBs covered, InterBase was released under the extremely generous Mozilla open source license - if they had released it under a more closed license like that of MySQL then Borland could have continued to use it as a revenue stream). InterBase versions 6.5 and 7 are not open source, but it is still a successful, quality database engine.
I wrote my response to contribute some information so that others needn't waste their time looking at MySQL when they can use Firebird instead (I only found out about Firebird a couple of years ago in a footnote to a very lengthy debate about the pros and cons of PostgreSQL and MySQL). I didn't do it because I want to bash PostgreSQL (it has a few features I would like to see in Firebird, just as Firebird has some features I would like to see in PostgreSQL.) For all I know, the comments by the PostgreSQL developer were full of praise for Firebird, but were edited down to that off-hand comment.
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Re:Firebird Evaluation
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 23, 2004 12:15 AMThe article covers all the other major open-source dbs in roughly the same amount of detail, but only makes an allusion to Firebird by quoting that developer. The only reference to Firebird in that article is "no offense to Firebird DB, which became a dynamic project" - which does not convey any information about Firebird except to make it look like some kind of weak also-ran compared to the other DBs mentioned.
The polls suggest that it is other open-source DBs which are the also-rans... Also, by failing to say that Borland have continued to develop and invest in InterBase, the article implies that Borland abandoned InterBase once Firebird forked off from it. But my understanding is that Borland had a change of heart after opening up InterBase and decided that it was too valuable/lucrative to relinquish the revenue stream (unlike several of the other open-source DBs covered, InterBase was released under the extremely generous Mozilla open source license - if they had released it under a more closed license like that of MySQL then Borland could have continued to use it as a revenue stream). InterBase versions 6.5 and 7 are not open source, but it is still a successful, quality database engine.
I wrote my response to contribute some information so that others needn't waste their time looking at MySQL when they can use Firebird instead (I only found out about Firebird a couple of years ago in a footnote to a very lengthy debate about the pros and cons of PostgreSQL and MySQL). I didn't do it because I want to bash PostgreSQL (it has a few features I would like to see in Firebird, just as Firebird has some features I would like to see in PostgreSQL.) For all I know, the comments by the PostgreSQL developer were full of praise for Firebird, but were edited down to that off-hand comment.
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