Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Hi! I am Firebird SQL

I've started using Firebird SQL (1 & 1.5) since 2001 mainly with Delphi. The combination is great especially with IBObjects. Before Firebird, I've use MS SQL 7, Interbase 6, and MySQL. I really had a great and wonderful experience with firebird compare to the rest that I've use.

Firebird comes with a lot of ANSI SQL features that's comparable to MS SQL, but not as complicated as MS SQL is. Programming triggers and store procedure is so much easier and it helps you manipulates your data. While MySQL is easy and lite,Firebird is also easy and lite without sacrificing many of the common important ANSI SQL features.

Presently, if I compare Firebird to MySQL and PostgreSQL, Firebird is somewhere in the middle of MySQL and PostgreSQL in terms of their respective strengths. One thing I don't understand is why Firebird doesn't get the attention/support that it deserve. Many open source project have no first class support to the said database. Web hosting with Firebird installation is very rare.

Is Firebird not as good as the way I see it? or it just lack some marketing.