> Message: 6 > Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 08:59:07 -0800 (PST) > From: CJ Koh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [plug] Re: mysql vs. posgresql? What is Firebird? > > I heard alot about firebird, but what is it really?
It's yet another open source DBMS alternative to PostgreSQL and MySQL. It is the open source fork of Borland's much-underrated (read: ineptly marketed) Interbase DBMS - specifically version 6.0. It is a fork because Borland rescinded and made later versions of Interbase non open source thus the open sourced based became a fork. The Firebird team tries to maintain compatibility with the newest versions of Interbase though where it makes sense. I chose Firebird over PostgreSQL because I was working mainly under Windows at that time and it was a pain getting PostgreSQL to run under it. My experience with Firebird has been mostly positive and I highly recommend it. I advise learning SQL using MySQL first before moving on to Firebird or PostgreSQL. The moving over part I definitely recommend to anyone thinking of using the SQL for business purposes (as opposed to web[1]). It doesn't take much to find the absence of subselects painful. I've used foreign keys (still not working in the latest MySQL 4.x accdg to my friend...) and see how using them can remove a whole class of headaches. It's also not hard to see how views, triggers and SPs can be useful and eliminate much tedious coding and design work. When it comes to elaborate multi-user concurrency schemes to minimize the need for locking, Interbase more or less invented the idea (back when it was still called GDB - Groton Database). Sybase, for all its popularity before, still had to resort to conservative locking! When I first used MySQL, MyISAM table handlers had just been introduced. I couldn't believe it when I found that table locking was the finest grained you could get - hell, even ancient Clipper had row level locking! :-D Note that MySQL's InnoDB table handler now has multiversioning concurrency and the implementation feels competently done, but I haven't had enough experience with it to know for sure. =========================================================== [1] In fact, with the advent of some great new Python-based server scripting solutions it's now also easy to use Firebird as a web-backend (via kinterbasdb in my case). F/LAFP (FreeBSD or Linux/Apache/Firebird/Python) is the approach I'm looking to take for the future instead of LAMP (which given its present popularity I'd have to say I discovered fairly early in the game). I'd use Linux for intranets, but believe I should stick to FreeBSD for servers on the 'Net. When all is said and done, the BSDs will just be better hardened and more stable than Linux given the same amount of effort. This is because the BSDs are designed more conservatively (with all the corresponding tradeoffs that implies - like being a bit behind in features). Another flipside is that I find Linux to be friendlier to work with (I'm using Slackware, btw, not RH or Mandrake... ;-). _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
