Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard 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.
The Firebird Project 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 (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000.
Firebird version that I know for the first time is 1.0 version. There're some advantages in using Firebird:
- The first point that is the installation is quite simple and easy to understand.
- Second, it already has view, trigger & store procedure that using PSQL (the procedural language that similar with Oracle PL/SQL) , so you do not spend to much time to understand FB.
- Third, FB is free and there is so much free tools that you can use, like IBExpert Personal Edition (one of the best tool for administrating FB) for free.
- Fourth, it has an active community that will help your problem at the FB Support mailing list (firebird-support@yahoogroups.com) . The 1.5.x version has more speed than 1.0.x version. Many people ask about the documentation of FB, yes it is still in development, the one that I use is the Interbase documentation and FB release notes , but now there is a book by Helen Borie that explain almost all thing that you want to know about Firebird. FB is perfect for small to midsize company (I suggest you to use 1.5.5 version for better performace), but I think it'll perform better after the 3.0 version that can use multiple processor (SMP). The lack of the 1.5.x version is that it doesn't support derived table and the poor index tree but both will be fixed in 2.x version.
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