IBPhoenix reports that Crystal Windows and Doors Ltd a large UK home improvement company. Firebird runs their bespoke CRM database and also their computerised production systems communicating with machinery on the factory floor.
From ComputerWorld:
The AJAX-based product features a visual designer and cross-compiling capabilities for programming in C#, Java, Visual Basic and Object Pascal. An embeddable Firebird database and Apache Web server also are included for application deployments. With WebOS AppsBuilder, Morfik saves developers from having to learn new languages for Web development such as PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) or Python.
Full article here.
Artur Anjos pointed that Banco do Brasil (one of the biggest banks in Brazil) is using Firebird to hold information in its enterprise applications, as you can read here (in portuguese). Babelfish translated version is here.
Pentaho Corp continues to hammer out rapid upgrades to key components of its evolving open source business intelligence suite.
Other open source projects that fall under Pentaho’s stewardship include JPivot, Firebird RDBMS and Enhyra Shark.
Full article here.
Audio from the sections of Firebird Conference 2005 are available in MP3 format here.
If you prefer Audio+Video, use IBExpertLive application.
Ok, I agree it is not too much useful, but it is fun:
99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-firebird-sql-257.html
From Dmitry Yemanov:
Windows builds of Firebird 2.0 Release Candidate 5 have been released with an issue related to the INTL support. This is not a bug in the code, but a build/packaging issue. One of the ICU libraries (icudt30.dll) got built wrongly. We apologize for inconvenience, the builds are to be fixed and re-released shortly. In the meantime, icudt30.dll from the RC4 package would fix the issue.
From code.google.com/p/npara/
Npara allows a user to find similar images or audio files
Npara identifies audio and video files by creating an index of sub fingerprints, aproximately 255 fingerprints per file. These fingerprints are stored in a firebird database.
Partial tracks or partial images can be recognized, even if they contain significant noise or distortion
Get your copy now! Probably this will become FB 2.0 final release 
Oracle Juices Up Berkeley DB – Oracle spruced up one of its recently acquired embeddable databases, Berkeley DB, releasing on Sept. 27 Version 4.5 with multi-version concurrency control and more.
This is old news for Firebird/InterBase users. MGA (or Versioning) architecture, used in FB/IB, was born with Snapshot isolation for transactions.
