Firebird in Evans Data survey
Which of the following databases have you used most often THIS YEAR?
The above question is in the newest Evans Data survey, about Open Source tools, and Firebird is one of the listed choices. You can vote now.
Author: Cantu
I'm the owner of the www.Firebase.com.br site and the author of the books Firebird Essencial, Firebird 2 and Migration Guide to Firebird 3. Loving Firebird even before it was born!
FBScanner 2.1 released
IBSurgeon just released the newest version of its Firebird server monitoring tool, FBScanner, with several new features. Read more here. Brazilians can take a look here too.
Habanero’s Firestarter now supports Firebird
Habanero is a free open source Enterprise Application Framework, supporting Object Relational Mapping (ORM). A set of class definitions describe how to persist data between object oriented code and a relational database backend. Firestarter is a modelling tool included with the Habanero download that manages the class definitions and allows you to reverse engineer the class definitions from an existing database.
Habanero currently supports data persistence to MySQL, Access, Sql Server, Oracle, SQLite, PostGreSQL, and more recently, Firebird. Due to popular demand, the Firestarter modeller has now been enhanced with the ability to reverse engineer from Firebird as well.
Read full history.
Cathedron+Firebrid = Winners of RAD Race 2008/2009
The combination of Cathedron and Firebird competed and won two times: this year and in 2004. During the 14 hour race a team of two people solve a realistic business problem.
The productivity during the race is about 10 minutes per function point. In large software companies the best projects require 6 to 10 hours per function point. This implies a 60 times higher productivity during the race. When the extreme conditions of the race are normalized and you triple the amount of time to fine tune and test the deliverables, the productivity is still 5 to 10 times higher.
The combination of Cathedron and Firebird allowed the team to rapidly create and change the basic application and the underlying database. During the 14 hour race over 70 small modifications where made to a database containing valuable test data! 99% of those changes were handled by Cathedron simply by changing the data model.
Cathedron can be downloaded from www.cathedron.com and is free for personal and educational use. Although the tool and documentation are still under development, the core features such as information/data modeling, (default) screen generation and the embedded Pascal scripts have been used in production environments for over 8 years.
Development of ODBC 2.0 driver for FB has resumed
You can find new beta builds of the ODBC 2.0 driver here.
Note: If you are using Firefox, remember to scroll down the page opened by the above link or you will not find the information.
Is Firebird poor?
Dmitry Kuzmenko posted the continuation of his first post about Firebird in his blog. Check it out.
What is Firebird?
Dmitry Kuzmenko has an interesting post in his blog that tries to describe what is the “Firebird Project” and “Firebird Foundation” (as well its papers in the whole thing). Also, it has some interesting statistics about downloads and installations, ie:
…But it stands more than 5000 visits every day and log more than 1000 installations at Windows platform per day (!), according to the statistics of the installer’s ‘landing page’. Also there are more than 1 mln downloads of all Firebird installers and other files per year from the sourceforge.
Read the full post.
FirebirdConfig is now Open Source
FirebirdConfig is an utility to help people to configure the parameters available in firebird.conf file. Now, anyone can join the project and help with the development. The language used is Delphi/Kylix.
New version of FirebirdConfig
The new version of FirebirdConfig (0.2) has interesting features, including incremental search, you can see more information on the website, as well the video of its new features.
5th FDD interviews for TV
Hardsoft TV was covering the last Firebird Developers Day in Brazil, and now interviews started to be put online in their site. You can check the first one here (it is in portuguese, but you can check the images of the local, attendees, speakers, etc). BTW, the link only works with Internet Explorer.
Update: The video is now available on Youtube: