#Oracle vs HP #Unix on #Itanium , and how you can fight back using Firebird on that

Oracle is abandoning HP Itanium customers as usual (like they did with MySQL) and there is a mehod to fight Back : use an open source “oracle like” RDBMS engine : Firebird

Posted by Paul Beach:

For those who are curious, Firebird V2.5 builds just fine on Itanium HPUX (IA-64). See prefix.hpux_aCC and prefix.hpux_ia64 in the builds/posix directory. The only issue we have in providing such builds, is access to the relevant hardware/operating system to do a build, and bringing upto date the HPUX installer.

Database Workbench 4.1.2 released

Ladies, gentlemen,

Upscene Productions is proud to announce the next
version of the popular multi-DBMS development tool:

Database Workbench 4.1.2 Pro

This release includes the FREE Lite versions for InterBase, Firebird
and MySQL.

For more information, see here.

Click here for the full list of the 43 changes in v4.1.2

Database Workbench supports:
– Borland InterBase ( 4.x – XE )
– Firebird ( 1.x, 2.x )
– MS SQL Server/MSDE ( 7, 2000, 2005, 2008, MSDE 1 & 2, SQL Express )
– MySQL 4.x, 5.x
– Oracle Database ( 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g )
– Sybase SQL Anywhere ( 9, 10, 11 and 12 )
– NexusDB ( 3.0 and up )

How to attract more developers to use FirebirdSQL , thread continues

Of course, I couldn’t finish this post without guessing (just guesses) the reasons why Firebird SQL is so unpopular if compared to MySQL or PostgreSQL :

1. There’s no big player like Sun/Oracle or IBM supporting it right now.

ED: Not an issue: there is no need for the big Oracle hug,  look what they have done to MySQL, OpenOffice, Hudson , they killed or dumped the projects and only community saved them by forking the source code and continuing under some sort of fundation umbrella: Apache, TDF . Another article that you must read is by Glyn Moody : Has Oracle been a disaster for Sun’s open source?

2. The official website is terrible (http://www.firebirdsql.org). Seems futile, but the first impression of the project is horrible. Makes you think it’s stalled.

ED:This is fixed , site was reworked , check the new design and compare with the old version from archive.org

3. Firebird’s biggest sponsor today is IBPhoenix , which main business IS Firebird. But even it’s website falls in the same problem.

ED This is fixed , site was reworked , check the new design and compare with the old version from archive.org

4. The fact of being Delphi related since it’s beginning.. With Delphi’s decadence, its popularity just floundered with it.

ED : That is solved we do have support for all the other new players : nodejs, rails , django , lua … And Lazarus apps are still the fastest one in benchmarks vs Java, .net …

5.Poor documentation

ED:Soon to be fixed , but more hands are needed , it’s easy to complain , please help to update and fix the bugs in the docs area

Maybe things may change to Firebird SQL after Oracle bought Sun (many MySQL users are getting scared (I see no reason for this by the way)) and may play with Firebird, but it’s something improbable to happen. 🙂

ED:Wind of change : i get more hits on my blog with things like phpbb3 installations , rails installations … and the traffic for FibirebirdSQL.org and FirebirdNews.org is going up, sourceforge download stats are up , also on the linux distro land and bsd side we are going well : packaged and ready to replace LAMP with FLAPS , firebird php driver is included in default php install on Windows

Of course, these are just my opinions about it. I really whould like to know yours. Why do you think so few developers are using Firebird today?

 

Firebird main website redesign : testers/proofreaders needed

We need all resources at the current stage of new web-site development.We have beta version now – www.firebirdtest.com, and it requires testing efforts.
The most important thing now is proofreading, so we need English native speakers first.

To report any problem, please create issues at tracker.firebirdsql.org in the Web site section http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/browse/WEB
(issues with wrong section will be not considered).
Please feel free to ask any questions.

Perl DBI driver Interbase-> Firebird rename/test/upload complete

Also i have tagged the release with release 0.52 in git
The cpan tar is be available here http://search.cpan.org/~mariuz/
There is only one test left to be fixed
Thanks Stefan for the help and fixes 🙂

Why it was needed and rationale:

Firebird sql forked from interbase and needs a new namespace for the drivers too also the drivers needs to be separated some things in the api and sql dialect are different and sooner or later there is a need for this separation also the DBD::InterBase seems to be unmaintained

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