At the beginning of January I posted a Request for Ideas: Firebird in .NET Tutorial. First of all, thanks to all who contributed their ideas.
I’m currently working hard on the tutorial. The original idea was to write just a quick introduction but it seems there is a lot to tell… The weakest point of Firebird seems to be the lack of freely available documentation – so I decided to invest a little bit more time in the tutorial.
Dan
Sequoia is a transparent middleware solution for clustering, load balancing and failover services for any database. The database is distributed and replicated among several nodes and Sequonia balances the queries among nodes. It is also known to handle node failures and support for checkpointing and hot recovery. It was formerly known as the clustered JDBC project and provides high availability and performance scalability for databases.
More about it on jax magazine
In my last blog entry reguarding the rumored SunDB I immediately discounted the Firebird Database as a contender. In the comments posted to that entry it was suggested that Firebird shouldn’t be so quickly discarded and may even be a “diamond in the rough”. Well, if I’m wrong I’m willing to explore it and admit that I’m wrong if thats the case, afterall, what if Firebird really that great? I certainly don’t want to miss out on a good thing. So thanks to Gentoo I quickly emerged Firebird 1.5.2 and started playing.
..::firebird::..
The Lazarus team is glad to announce the 0.9.12 release. This release is based on fpc 2.0.2 and the binary packages now contain many standard packages:
This release can be downloaded from the sourceforge download page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=89339
Detailed list of changes
Lazarus supports Firebird with SQLdb package that comes with the IDE
or third party components. I wrote about that in my blog
That is why I didn’t mentioned on firebirdnews again
Benchmarks with Firebird 1.5.2 and the rest of the pack , Draw your own conclusions
http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=SpeedComparison
Spoted on Tim Anderson’s Tech writing blog
Here are the experiences on Trustix 3 , and maybe someone will contribute the firebrd rpm to trustix too. (with dependencies solved)
I’ve done preparing Firebird 1.5.3 packages.
deb[-src] ftp://shrek.creditreform.bg/public sid main
All feedback is warmly welcome. If no problems are found, I’ll proceed with
upload to the archive.
Ah, also there you can find packages for flamerobin.
Damyan Ivanov
All you need to do is to add the above repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list
and then apt-get update ; apt-cache search firebird
then install what you need (classic or super server)
Here is a good link in businessweek on how OSS databases are horning in on
the database market.
I personally think that the majority of database users can do there work
with either Postgrsql, MySql or others like the Borland interbase now know
as Firebird or even Computer Associates Ingres which was recently made
opensource. Really do most company really need all those extra features or
are they just selling feature like Picture in picture was on your new TV
which you never use now. 
Here is the link for you to check out:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060206_918648.htm
Best regards,
–Richard Houston
“BusinessWeek has another spread on open source this week. Among them is an article about open source vs. the database vendors which focused on how businesses are looking to save money with open source (rather than using the source to innovate). From the article:
“The databases work fine, but as data volume grows, so do the checks to Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft. Many users aren’t clamoring for more features, and some don’t even use the bells and whistles they already paid for. They would happily trade some to get their hands on the source code and a better deal.”
Original source for news slashdot.org
I’ve been wonder for some about about metrics to evaluate the relative architectural cleanliness of various database implementations. To that end, I wrote a simple program that eat Visual Studio 7 projects files and analyzes the source files. Here are the results:
| Nfs Engine | Vulcan | Firebird 2 | MySQL Server | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Modules | 429 | 633 | 232 | 123 |
| Total Lines | 63432 | 227814 | 126274 | 214356 |
| Code Modules | 206 | 218 | 70 | 99 |
| Header Modules | 221 | 394 | 162 | 15 |
| Preprocessed Modules | 0 | 16 | 0 | 0 |
| Other Modules | 2 | 5 | 0 | 9 |
| Number Functions | 2839 | 4706 | 1633 | 4960 |
| Average Arguments | 5.00 | 8.65 | 13.08 | 7.58 |
| Average FunctionLines | 14.86 | 32.46 | 55.95 | 31.70 |
| Average Code Lines | 11.80 | 21.20 | 37.12 | 26.90 |
| Average Internal Comments | 0.94 | 6.10 | 11.92 | 2.59 |
| Average Internal WhiteSpace | 2.12 | 5.16 | 6.92 | 2.21 |
The analysis program doesn’t try to follow conditional compilation, so everything is included whether active or not.
The Netfrastructure engine is roughly equivalent in functionality to Firebird. The Netfrastructure numbers, however, are for the database engine only, excluding the Java Virtual Machine and template engine. Since the trigger and procedure language in Netfrastructure are Java, this isn’t a strict apples to apples comparison. On the other hand,the Netfrastructure engine includes the remote server, which Vulcan does not.
