Years ago Interbase was made Open Source. From this the Firebird project was created. You wouldn't want the original Interbase source since it was a bit buggy and hard to maintain. The Firebird project rewrote the whole code from C to C++ and added many performance improvements and nice features. Interbase itself hasn't been open source for long: Borland/Inprise quickly decided to make their product closed source again and are still selling it. But compared to Firebird I don't know a reason for buying Interbase. Except maybe slightly better support for multiple cores which will be better supported by Firebird in less than a year anyways. For now just make sure to use the Classic Server version of Firebird if you have many concurrent connections on a many-core machine. If you want commercial support for Firebird or Interbase you can get that from IBPhoenix: http://www.ibphoenix.com/
If you have specific questions regarding Firebird (or Interbase) feel free to ask them in the Firebird-Support mailing list at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/firebird-support/ There are a lot of helpful people with deep knowledge about both products. As for using Firebird/Interbase from Delphi I only have experience with IBObjects. www.IBObjects.com There has been quite a break since the last release but Delphi 2009 support is worked on and soon to be released. IBObjects has quite some learning curve but as soon as you're getting used to it it allows you to take whole advantage of everything the database has to offer. HTH, Markus On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 17:31, David Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > While you're on the line: What is the difference between Firebird and > Interbase? And is there an open source version of Interbase somewhere? I've > heard conflicting info on this. > > Dave
