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List:       jaxlug-list
Subject:    Re: [JAXLUG] For William - Firebird 2.0 Final Released
From:       "William L. Thomson Jr." <wlt () obsidian-studios ! com>
Date:       2006-11-13 14:37:43
Message-ID: 1163428663.3319.17.camel () wlt ! obsidian-studios ! com
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Yep Fb 2.0 is out :) Although pretty sure no one has packaged it for
Gentoo :( Likely something I will have to help out with. As if I have
time.

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 08:28 -0500, Kyle Gonzales wrote:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/11/13/046235.shtml
> 
> This statement from one of the Slashdot posters helped me understand
> what Firebird was for primarily:
> 
> "Don't go comparing it to MySql, PostGRE, Oracle XE, or MSSQL Express.

Who ever posted that to slash dot is a idiot, moron etc. It's routinely
compared to all but MSSQL Express, what ever crap that is. PostgreSQL is
likely the closest to Firebird. However PostrgreSQL only recently added
support for roles, and MySQL had to add on a whole host of stuff to be
ANSI SQL-92 compliant, much less 99. So Firebird for quite some time has
been one of the most robust standards compliant FOSS RDBMS.

Really all it lacks is stuff like clustering, hot failover, and etc. The
type of stuff really only like Oracle, maybe MSSQL, DB2, etc are capable
of. 2.0 features much better SMP support and etc, but still far from
where it needs to be for the large scale enterprise operations. Usually
where PostgreSQL or MySQL won't scale to either.

> I'm not sure how the performance for databases larger than the amount of
> available memory will work meaning, I've never profied the IO
> performance.

Then they should not be commenting on making comparisons. Firebird does
extremely well with large databases. It's limit tends to be the OS file
size limit. But a db can spread many db files, so that's not really a
road block. It can use little memory, allot etc. All depends on how the
DB was designed, and how the Fb engine was tuned based on available
hardware and resources.

>  Still, it's a great alternative to storing complex data
> structures as binary files or stubbing a prototype db for rapid
> development."

It's an excellent alternative. However most FOSS media tend to overlook
it. Trying to find articles, reviews, comparisons on Firebird and other
RDBMS is far and few between. Given the history behind Firebird and that
it's one of the oldest, if not the oldest FOSS RDMBS out there. Although
for most of it's life, it was a closed source proprietary app. It was
only because of Borlands mistake with open sourcing InterBase 6.0, that
Firebird has come to be.

Which Borland still develops and sells to this day.
http://www.borland.com/us/products/interbase/index.html

So there must be a market if Borland can afford to keep InterBase going,
despite a now modified "clone" existing and being FOSS.

I also like the Foundation behind Firebird. I like projects and things
that are foundation driven, Apache, Firebird, Gentoo :) All foundations.


-- 
Sincerely,
William L. Thomson Jr.
Obsidian-Studios, Inc.
http://www.obsidian-studios.com

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