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Firebird (sometimes called FirebirdSQL) is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 and SQL-99 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird is released under the InterBase Public License, a modification of the open source Mozilla license, being based on the source code of InterBase. Firebird was programmed and is maintained by IBPhoenix (http://ibphoenix.com).
The current stable version is Firebird 1.5.2. This release (http://ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_download_15) represents a commitment by the project to develop and deliver ongoing improvements to this popular open source database engine.
The NPTL (Native Posix Thread Library (http://www.google.com/search?q=Native+Posix+Thread+Library)) Linux builds referred to in the release notes (http://www.ibphoenix.com/downloads/Firebird_v15pt1_ReleaseNotes.pdf) are available in downloads (http://ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_download_15) area
Changes from previous version:
This release adds a charset improvement, allowing use of NONE as a fully transparent charset everywhere. (Changes were made in the engine to make the character set NONE more friendly about reading / writing data from and to fields of another character set.)
It adds the config-driven ability to abort a server process in the case of bugchecks or structured exceptions (to produce a core dump).
Firebird Superserver had a link-time backward compatibility issue with the NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) that may cause it to be unstable on Linux distributions that enable the NPTL in the GNU C. The new NPTL builds of Superserver solved these problems.
Actual release represents a major upgrade to the engine, which has been developed by an independent team (http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=9028) of voluntary developers from the InterBase(tm) source code (http://sourceforge.net/projects/interbase/) that was released by Borland under the InterBase Public License (http://ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?page=ibp_ipl) v.1.0 on 25 July 2000.
Development on the Firebird 2 codebase began early in Firebird 1 development, with the porting of the Firebird 1 C code (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/firebird/interbase/) to C++ and the first major code-cleaning. Firebird 1.5 is the first release of the Firebird 2 codebase (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/firebird/firebird2/). It is a significant milestone for the developers and the whole Firebird project, but it is not an end in itself. As Firebird 1.5 goes to release, major redevelopment continues toward the next point release on the journey to Firebird 2.
History
Firebird at 20 years from Jim Starkey (http://www.interbase-world.com/en/community/interviews/577.php):
- "September 4, 2004 is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird (http://www.firebirdsql.org) I quit my job at DEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation) in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/firebird/interbase/gpre/gpre.c?rev=1.7&view=auto) and gpre.h (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/firebird/interbase/gpre/gpre.h?rev=1.5&view=auto). The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350 (http://www.vintage-computer.com/dec_pro_350.shtml) a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s."
Name clash
In April 2003, Mozilla.org decided to rename their web browser from Phoenix to Firebird. This decision caused concern within the Firebird database project due to the assumption that users would be confused by a database and web browser using the Firebird name. The dispute continued until the Mozilla developers issued a statement making clear that the Firebird name was in reality Mozilla Firebird. The statement also made clear the Mozilla Firebird name was a project codename. On February 9, 2004, Mozilla renamed its browser the Mozilla Firefox, thus clearing up confusion (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html).
External links
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