Firebird
I have been a user of Firebird for the last 7 years or so, since Interbase 6 became open source. The decision to use Firebird was a commercial one, as at the time the product we were going to use it with was going to be leased as a black box so keeping the costs down was a priority. The cross platform nature of Firebird meant that it could be provided on a leased linux appliance, through to a high end unix server and also run on Windows boxes as required.
The use of the system in a DBA less environment also suits Firebird, indeed, we have had systems up for 6 years with no data corruption (except when the harddisk failed) and all administration performed via linux cron jobs.
The only areas where Firebird has caused problems is in the lack of inbuilt functions. This can be worked around using user defined functions, allthough these can be tricky to write in a manner which supports multiple operating systems and platforms. Note that in version 2.1 there are far more inbuilt functions, removing the need for many common UDFs.
Last updated: 12 Mar 2008 20:15:56