Category: General news

This is a reply from Ann Harrison posted in Firebird-Support list:

Michael Fisher wrote:
Could the situation that happened to MySQL happen to Firebird? Could a company like Oracle start buying up aspects of Firebird? An overview of the situation with Firebird would be very helpful.

There are a number of differences between Firebird and MySQL (understatement of the week). Those difference would make it difficult or impossible for a company to buy part or all of Firebird.

One is that the copyright to each module of Firebird’s code rests with the developer who created it – the Initial Developer of the Initial Developers Public License. MySQL and InnoDB required that developers sign over all rights to a corporation, giving an acquirer a single target.

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Today it became generally known that MySQL has aquired a company called Netfrastructure. This company offers a product which is a reimplementation of the Firebird database architecture, combined with a web-based application server front end. It was designed by Jim Starkey in the late nineties and combines a database, a custom java virtual machine and a web server. Jim Starkey is also the principal author of Datatrieve, Rdb/ELN and InterBase, which became Firebird after being open-sourced in 2000.

Since the aquisition of InnoDB, by Oracle, MySQL has been in a difficult position: InnoDB was the centre piece of its 5.0 release. It has been discussed extensively in the Firebird community that MySQL should make a strategic move and use Firebird as its enterprise level relational/transactional engine.

MySQL chose this path — in a round-about sort of way — by making the aquisition of Netfrastructure and hiring Jim Starky, owner of Netfrastructure. Jim had recently been contributing to the Firebird project, under contract by one of the project’s sponsoring companies.

This move by MySQL validates that Firebird has the most mature and featured full open source code base and seems to indicate that the MySQL database product will be moving in similar paths from now on. MySQL also stands a lot to gain from the fact that the Firebird project has about 50 developers working on this architecture and helping to drive it into the future. The Firebird project gains from a well-known name and large sales force introducing its technology to customers world-wide.

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Jim Starkey, the original creator of InterBase which became Firebird, just made it publicly known that he now works for MySQL AB.

My company, Netfrastructure, Inc., has been acquired by MySQL, AB. As
part of the agreement, I will be working full time for MySQL. I expect
to lurk on the architecture list from time to time and may contribute
the occasional wolf-o-gram, but I will not be taking an active part in
Firebird development. Although Ann will work for MySQL, part time,
translating from wolf to English, she will continue to be active in the
Firebird project.

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This document outlines how much Firebird conforms to the current SQL standard.[2003] Please note that the following information is not a full statement of conformance, but just information for those interested in the subject.

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::..

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