|
What is Firebird?
Firebird is an open source relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92
features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms.
Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, powerful language
support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in many
production systems within a large number of commercial companies since 1981.
Firebird 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) under the
InterBase Public License V.1.0 on 25 July, 2000.
What is the Firebird Database?
As it's stands today, Firebird 1.0 is basically the InterBase® 6.0 engine
released by Borland with a lot of bug fixes and some improvements. So, if
you want to know what Firebird can do for you, you have to look at InterBase
6.0 first...
About InterBase, Firebird's predecessor
InterBase is an open source relational database that runs on Linux,
Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. It is the same commercial database
that Motorola, Nokia, Boeing, and the Boston Stock Exchange have used for
many years. InterBase offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and a
powerful language for stored procedures and triggers. Since 1985 InterBase
has provided the strength of a powerful, high performance, proven
architecture with the sophisticated technology applications need to be
successful.
InterBase was released by Borland under the
InterBase Public Licence, a variant of Mozilla Public Licence (MPL).
About Firebird, InterBase's successor
In contrast to the open source InterBase 6 and new versions of InterBase
provided by Borland that is available only on Windows, Linux and Solaris,
Firebird has been successfully built and run on additional platforms like
MacOS X (Darwin), FreeBSD and OpenBSD, HP-UX, AIX and others as well.
Firebird 1.0 improves on InterBase in more ways than just the number of
available platforms. Firebird excels in how bugs (and some bugs always
appear in any piece of software) are handled. As in any other Open Source
project, the whole development process is transparent to everyone, so you
know the exact state of a bug that you have reported (or anyone else's for
that matter), when it's fixed and how it was fixed, and the download the
fixed version of the software as soon as it is available. Although bugs are
found and fixed by development team on a regular basis, you too can have an
influence on the development process, by providing your feedback, your
assistance or helping to finance the work.
The Firebird development team doesn't just concentrate solely on bug
fixes, but it also adds new features and improvements as well. Because
Firebird developers are also Firebird everyday users, they are focused on
features and improvements that really "scratch an itch", rather than on
features for features sake like you find in many commercial products.
Firebird Version 1.5
The V1.5 release of Firebird represents a major upgrade to the V1.0
database engine, which has been developed by an independent team of
voluntary developers from the original InterBase source code that was
released by Borland under the InterBase Public License on 25th July 2000.
Development on the Firebird 2 codebase began early on during the Firebird
V1.0 development process, with the porting of the Firebird 1.0 C code to C++
and the first major steps at code clean up. Firebird V1.5 is the first
release of the Firebird 2 codebase and represents a significant milestone
for the developers and the whole Firebird project.
There are many new features and bugs fixed and the list of major changes
beyond the original V1.0 version is quite long. Please read all the Release
Notes for relevant information |
