Comments on: Top 4 Free Embedded Databases

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:56:53 +0000

Oh please.
1st – firebird is easy to work with and implement. I’ve worked with Oracle, PostGre, Interbase (essentially the same thing, but diferent) and firebird is the easiest to implement, by far.

2nd – The documentation may not be free, but there is a very complete book by Helen Borrie that covers all the need-to-know things and a ton of tips to use on a daily basis. And yes, it does have the embedded info also.

3rd – Yes, the site is a bit messy, but there are at least a dozen of good sites out there and a very good and supportive newsgroup. One of Interbase/Firebird creators, Ann Harrison, answers questions on a regular basis. Helen Borrie is there daily as are the programmers of the engine.

I really thought it was the embedded engine that was being tested, not the website. You wrote 6 items about it being 2 of them rants about the site. I expected some kind of test results, implementation experiences… something more about your pratical experiences. Will this news have a follow-up?

By: SS

SS — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:16:25 +0000

I’ve been Interbase/Firebird fan since I knew Interbase in late 96.

But is a shame that after about 8 years since Firebird was forked from IB open source and there is no official documentation on the product as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Regards.

By: The Chief Priest

The Chief Priest — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:50:37 +0000

Heck, Firebird is so easy to use that you really dont need any serious documentation. Read the source code. Thats all the documentation you need. Beside that Firebird has a large community. Ask the question and it shall be answered.

By: White Shadow

White Shadow — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:41:18 +0000

That’s a good point, but somewhat irrelevant – MySQL and Postgres don’t have a free embedded version (AFAIK). Well, MySQL kind-of has something, but it appears to be commercial.

By: gemini

gemini — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 05:01:57 +0000

the problem with firebird, is you don’t have documentation like for e.g postgres and mysql. it has some old docs for “Interbase”. if you want say sql reference for firebird, you have to buy some book from them … some Borrie person.

that’s why I moved to mysql, they have the whole technical docs on their site. The same thing applies to postgres. they have good docs at their site.

By: White Shadow

White Shadow — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:35:32 +0000

Hmm, I got that figure from Firebird’s site and decided I could trust it. However, it appears you are right – the precompiled Win32 embedded version is actually around 4.79 Mb (just the 4 main DLL’s without INTL and runtimes). I’ll edit the post.

By: Miha

Miha — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:56:40 +0000

Where did you get 2MiB for Firebird?
Embedded version is 6MiB. You can also compile it yourself then you’ll have one DLL approx. 4,5MiB in size.

By: Paul Linehan

Paul Linehan — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:32:56 +0000

If I’ve understood Firebird correctly, concurrency works under Linux but not
with the Windows dll.

I’m using it at the moment as a proof of concept and it’s great.

By: White Shadow

White Shadow — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:55:46 +0000

Good idea. I really liked what I saw of Firebird (referential integrity and (hopefully) working concurrency, yay), but IMHO the current website makes it non-trivial to find out how to use it in practice. A simpler design with a unified structure would be nice.

By: mariuz

mariuz — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:04:25 +0000

we started to modernise the design and i proposed some new ideas to firebird-web
i will start to add the issues to the tracker
http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=devel&sub=web&id=webtools

so we can fix the old cruft that is in the way of the end user