On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 3:54 PM, Eric Selje eric.selje@gmail.com wrote:
I'm playing w/ Firebase, but that's a whole different thing. Is Firebird still a thing? Is that the evoution of Paradox?
Firebird is different from Firebase, and has nothing to do with Freebird, either. Or Mozilla. Or FireFox, Thunderbird or Phoenix, AZ.
Firebird is the OpenSource release of the Interbase data engine, formerly known as the Borland Database Engine.
Is it still a thing might depend on your perspective. It is a free as in speech, free as in beer, fully open-sourced product. It's a robust RDBMS, capable of gigabytes of data storage, transactions, auditing, all the core "stuff" that goes into a database engine. It's got triggers and constraints and UDFs. Ideally, it runs on Linux, and the server and processes that interact with the server (like Java, Python, etc. apps) reside on the same machine, though the apps can certainly buffer web access through their applications. There are ADO, ODBC and many other connectors.
There's a small, ragtag, fervent group of zealots (sound familiar <g>?) keeping the flame alive. There are some pretty impressive 3rd party tools. A guru named Helen Borrie wrote a 1000+ page book on it in 2004, and she released a 3-volume book sent on it last year. There's a conference, and there are newsletters.
So, is it a thing? Yeah, maybe.
I happened across it because a potential client has a Quickbooks inventory extension that uses that as the backend, and they have customized it. So, I'm poking at it. There are packages for Fedora, RedHat, CentOS and Ubuntu, and I've got "Hello, World!" running.