What is Firebird?

firebird_logo.pngFirebird is a versatile, crash proof, easy to use yet very powerful database server.

Firebird is an open source relational database offering many ANSI SQL-99 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in many production systems within a large number of commercial companies.

Firebird is a descendant of the commercial product Borland Interbase icon-external-link.png. In the year 2000, version 6 of the code was released by Borland (now: CodeGear/Embarcadero) as Open Source and was immediately forked as Firebird, ironically by the original makers themselves. Shortly after that, Borland did not further develop the Open Source version, but went on with a closed sourced edition: apparently Open Sourcing was a mistake from Borland's point of view. Firebird then rapidly gained traction and developed into an even more robust and versatile Open Source database as it were then.

What set's Firebird apart

  • Low overhead
  • Complete ACID operation
  • Multi Generation Architecture, no transaction log needed, thus providing ultimate isolation
  • Near zero administration and installation
  • Extremely scalable, from embedded server on the desktop to multi-core, multi-threaded machines
  • Very robust
  • Powerful SQL implementation, with events, (multiple) post- en pre triggers, etc.
  • Cross platform (Linux,Windows, Mac, etc.) and 64 bit
  • Many connection options: IBX (Delphi), JDBC (Java), ODBC, .Net, Python, etc.

Next to MySQL icon-external-link.png and PostgresSQL icon-external-link.png, Firebird forms yet another usable open source alternative for database serving.

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