Firebird Reviews

Firebird, the little database server that can. In a big way! I have used Firebird in all projects where the choice was not set, for the last 20 years, starting with the open source version of Interbase. From embedded to 24/7 running servers with hundreds of concurrent connections. Hundreds of databases, millions of records. Front-ends in Delphi,Python,.Net,PHP.Lua. Never lost any data. It just works. + Small, very reliable, works well on Windows, Mac and Linux, very portable, database is just a file. + Excellent and Full SQL support, in FB3 with windowing etc. Domains that can be used everywhere, cursors, etc, etc. + Generators/Sequences instead of the, dare I say it, insane autoinc fields in SQL server. + Excellent performance when using the right indexes etc. Indexing is crucial as it does not just take all internal memory to cache everything like SQL server does. + Excellent procedural and trigger language, much like Oracle, much better than SQL server. Stored procedures can behave as virtual tables(using 'suspend', think of yield), making them great for multi-tier development, actually it just makes them great, period. +Multi generational architecture makes it almost impossible to get locked. No, you don't need to query with a nolock option like in SQL server. +Backup/restore is painless, but you need a command-line tool called gbak. Are there downsides ? - Tooling, but excellent paid tools exist ( EMS sql manager, Upscene produtions SQL studio) - Size of rows are only 32 kilobytes. Need varchar to the max? You are out of luck. But support for Blobs is good and actually quite fast (almost as directly reading/writing to file) - Support/Community?