Hey All, Lately there has been a lot of discussion about various open source RDBMS pacakges (specifically Postgresql and Mysql). I am wondering if anyone has experience / thoughts on Interbase / Firebird (firebird.sourceforge.net). Basically Borland/Inprise released their commercial (Interbase) database offering Open Source a few years ago. Firebird is a branch of Interbase that fixes a few problems in Interbase. I've been using it a bit lately and so far prefer it to either of MySQL or Postgresql for several reasons:
1) has some very good commercial and free administration tools (some with GUI) that make it easy to get started. 2) supports a very complete (AFIAK) SQL command set 3) very easy to setup and administer 4) supports run-time backups 5) database shadows 6) consistent reads 7) good trackrecord. 8) quick recovery from crashes (usually fraction of a second) used in U.S. mil tanks for this reason. 9) interfaces with Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, C, ... quite well 10) stored procedures, triggers and other handy things 11) extensible through UDFs (User Defined Functions), calls to native libraries 12) domains are really, really cool 13) small memory footprint (2M kernel, 10M for full system with client) 14) killer feature: quite cross plaftorm, runs happily on windows, linux, various unixes, ... (I hate it when apps require on platform or another :) Anyway. I really like it and have had good experiences with it, and have read some good stuff about it. Anyone else used / heard of it? I would love to hear your thoughts. Jeff
