Firebird (sometimes called FirebirdSQL) is a relational database management system offering many ANSI SQL-99 and SQL-2003 features. It runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird was programmed and is maintained by Firebird Foundation (formerly known as FirebirdSQL Foundation). It was forked from the open sources of InterBase from Borland.

New code modules added to Firebird are licensed under the Initial Developer's Public License (IDPL). The original modules released by Inprise are licensed under the InterBase Public License 1.0. Both licences are modified versions of the Mozilla Public License 1.1.

History

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Development on the Firebird 2 codebase began with the porting of the Firebird 1.0.x C code to C++ and the first major code-cleaning. Firebird 1.5 is the first release of the Firebird 2 codebase. 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.x and Firebird 3.0 (code named Vulcan)

Other important information is found on Interbase History page

Firebird at 20 years, Recollection from Jim Starkey (how it all started):

"September 4, 2004 is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird I quit my job at DEC 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 and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350 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."

Stable version changelog

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The current stable version is Firebird 1.5.3. This release represents a commitment by the project to develop and deliver ongoing improvements to this popular open source database engine.

The Native Posix Thread Library Linux builds referred to in the release notes are available in downloads 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.

The current release represents a major upgrade to the engine, which has been developed by an independent team of voluntary developers from the InterBase(tm) source code that was released by Borland under the InterBase Public License v.1.0 on 25 July 2000.

Mozilla Firefox name clash

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In April 2003, Mozilla Foundation 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.

See also

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• List of relational database management systems
• Comparison of relational database management systems
• Fyracle
• Yaffil - ex-fork of Firebird 1.x, when its development was stalled. Now merged back to main stream.

External links

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• Firebird - Relational Database for the New Millennium
• IBPhoenix Home
• Firebird project on sourceforge
• FBTalk - web based, Firebird support forum
• IBExpert Home - Admintool for Firebird/Interbase, free Personal Edition
• IBEasy++ Free Admintool for Firebird/Interbase
• Firebird Community Database News
• Fyracle, oracle-mode Firebird
• FireBase - Brazilian portal devoted to Firebird (in portuguese)
• iBase - russian community of Firebird and Interbase users
• FirebirdNews - Major source of Firebird related news
• IB World - online magazine about Firebird and Interbase
• DotNetFirebird (Using Firebird SQL in .NET)
• IB Provider - proprietary provider of Interbase and Firebird DBMS in Microsoft OLE DB API

Borland | Open source database management systems

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