Mailing List Archive

Antoine wrote:
> Hi,
> I have just learnt about the firebird project and was wondering how
> alive it is. I know this is hard to quantify, but is development going
> better/worse than postgres? In terms of features it looks quite
> exciting... It seems to be more mature than postgres, but that could
> be my ignorance speaking... They only have 50-odd people active on the
> project (and that is including programmers, documenters, testers,
> etc), and I imagine that is heaps fewer than postgres. That have a
> good start, but what are things going to look like in 5 years? I quite
> frankly don't like mysql that much
> and defintely want something like one of these two, but the simple
> fact of the matter is that I heard of postgres a long time ago, and
> firebird only today. Does that mean I have my head in a dark, smelly
> place, or that firebird is not as active? Will there still be people
> developing firebird in 10yrs? At a quick glance php support looks to
> be at least as strong for firebird, but a lot of things seem to be for
> interbase - are they always going to be compatible? I see pear db has
> support for interbase, does that mean firebird too, or just the latest
> interbase?
>
> Cheers
> Antoine
>

sapdb ... it went opensource and if you can get a copy of a 7.4 sapdb
(not the maxdb - I had problems with upgrade but if you're not upgrading
who knows) you won't regret it. It's quite fast.
But if it's integration with php that you want, you might have to wait a
while. Also another minus of sapdb/maxdb is the lack of an sqlstudio
client for linux/web-based. There's a java gui of DBMGui, but sap/max
have an excelent web-based client for that so what's the point of it?

--

Adi

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On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 19:23:47 +0200, Antoine <melser.anton@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have just learnt about the firebird project and was wondering how
> alive it is. I know this is hard to quantify, but is development going
> better/worse than postgres?

Read this post:

http://forums.devshed.com/showpost.php?s=96955a2b5699136fd334c19f720b6dd9&p=271321&postcount=14

It's rather old, but very informative.

Main features of Firebird are: good support of sql92, stored
procedures, triggers, views and events.

> Does that mean I have my head in a dark, smelly
> place, or that firebird is not as active?

Firebird lists are very active, with 30-40 posts a day in firebird-user.

Start your browsing with www.ibphoenix.com, there are lots of
documents and links to resources (tutorials, JDBC/.NET/ODBC providers,
etc).

Recently was released version 1.5.1 of Firebird, and developers are
working towards 2.0 very fast.

I think the main problem of Firebird is that it lacks a good
administration tool under Linux. In win32 you can use IBExpert, a
free-as-in-beer tool. Also it's hard to manage a transaction between 2
databases.

I have used Firebird in Win32 for 3 years now, and I can say it's fast
(some benchmarks show that it is even faster under linux). Not as fast
as MySql, but with lots of features.

Right now it is compatible with Interbase 6/6.01 and Firebird 1.0.3
(mostly the same) but newer versions of Interbase and Firebird are
diverging. At least in the Win32 world Firebird is getting support
from most database components vendors, specially those related with
Borland products. You also have support for python, perl, java, .net
(or mono), php, delphi/kylix and C/C++.

Bye!
--
Obstáculos es lo que ves cuando apartas la vista del objetivo.

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Antoine wrote:

> Hi,
> I have just learnt about the firebird project and was wondering how
> alive it is. I know this is hard to quantify, but is development going
> better/worse than postgres? In terms of features it looks quite
> exciting... It seems to be more mature than postgres, but that could
> be my ignorance speaking... They only have 50-odd people active on the
> project (and that is including programmers, documenters, testers,
> etc), and I imagine that is heaps fewer than postgres. That have a
> good start, but what are things going to look like in 5 years? I quite
> frankly don't like mysql that much
> and defintely want something like one of these two, but the simple
> fact of the matter is that I heard of postgres a long time ago, and
> firebird only today. Does that mean I have my head in a dark, smelly
> place, or that firebird is not as active? Will there still be people
> developing firebird in 10yrs? At a quick glance php support looks to
> be at least as strong for firebird, but a lot of things seem to be for
> interbase - are they always going to be compatible? I see pear db has
> support for interbase, does that mean firebird too, or just the latest
> interbase?
>
> Cheers
> Antoine
>

For me, deciding between firebird and postgresql has been a difficult
choice because they are both very very good! I always dream they would
be a firebirdpostgresql or post_fire_sql_bird or something,.. then I can
stop deciding :)

I felt firebird has a stronger edge if you deploy server on both linux
and win32 box (firebird runs well on win98 too), but postgresql 8.0
onwards also supports win32 natively (nt,2k,xp, but not win98)..
Firebird tends to be simpler to setup and run. Running on linux alone,
postgresql seems more mature.

So, perhalps your choice is based on available drivers / dev language /
platform issue.

I've been testing postgresql from time to time, but have used firebird
extensively for 1 year, due to deployment issues (win98).

Albert

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