Firebird is an open-source structured query Language (SQL) RDBMS(relational database management system). It supports Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS, and other Unix Platforms. The firebird software is designed on SourceForge, within a week of InterBase 6.0 being released by Borland.
It is a commercially independent project of C+ and C++ programmers. It supports developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released on 25 July,2000.
What is Firebird Software?
This incredible software presents remarkable high performance, concurrency, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been termed differently in the past and used under production systems since 1981.
Firebird 2.5 introduced many new features such as multithreading, regular expression of syntax, and the ability to query the remote database. The latest version that was released on 19 April 2016, is highly focused on performance and security. The major feature of this code is that it allows total support to SMP machines when using the supersaver version.
Features of Firebird Software
Firebird software has many valuable features. Let’s have a look at some of these.
- Full ACID-compliant transactions
- Referential integrity
- Support of external functions
- Full support of the stored procedures and triggers
- GUI administrative tool, replications tool, and other third-party tools
- Multi-Generational Architecture
- Careful writes-fast recovery
- Full Cursor Implementation in PSQL
- Native/API, DB, Express/FireDAC, ODBC, OLE DB, Python model, PHP.
- Incremental Backups.
Multi-Generational Architecture
The database engine keeps the different versions of each record changed by active users to ensure the ACID properties of the transactions. The last version of every change record is marked as definitive. The database engines keep the records in the original record version if the transactions are rolled back. In conclusion, this Firebird writing is concise and limited as compared to traditional writing.
The tradeoff is some maintenance that is required every few moments to wipe out the old record versions. This also helps to make some space on the disk.
This ensures the OLTP and DSS/OLAP operations can be run at the same time without the delays caused by the locking mechanism found in other products.
Indexes
All the databases of indices behaved like properly trained “clustered Indexes” used by other architectures. They are not subject to the two-phase locking, ‘and’ and ‘or’ operations can be performed on intermediate bitmaps at a negligible cost, eradicating the need for the optimizer to choose between alternative indexes.
How to Download Firebird Software?
This software is completely free of any registration fee, licensing, or deployment fees. It can be used completely free and can also be used freely with the third-party plug-in. It has released two modules: a new code module and the original modules. Both of these modules and their licenses are the modified versions of the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
You can download this software from our website in a few simple and easy steps.
- Scroll down and click on the download option
- Download the file
- Now install this software by following the instructions.
- After the completion of installation, this software is ready to use.
How to Update Firebird Version?
You can update the firebird version by following the steps given below.
- Download the installation files from our website
- Backup any old databases
- Shutdown or uninstall the old version
- You can now install the new version
- Restore the databases
- Now you can replace the old fb client
- Congratulations! You got your new updated Firebird.
Variants of FireBird
Firebird is not a single software but it also has many variants.
- Firebird SuperServer has a single server for all connections of the client, multithreaded with a shared cache.
- Firebird SuperClassic also has only one server for all client connections and is multithreaded with a separate cache
- Firebird Classic uses a super-server daemon to run a single copy of the server per client connection, recommended for SMP systems but might have event-notification issues if the reach is via a firewall.
- Another variant that is being used is Firebird Embedded. It is utilized to create CD ROM catalogs, and single-user or evaluation versions of applications.
Storage Organizations
This software utilizes heap file organization with the linked list structure. Database pages which we called Pointer pages consist of a list of data pages that are part of a single table. Each pointer page contains a pointer for the next pointer page for the table.
Stored Procedure
It supports two kinds of stored procedures: executable and selectable. Executable procedures modify data in the database. Selectable procedures retrieve data and return an arbitrary number of rows.
Conclusion
Firebird is free software and it is more reliable as well. There is no point in index or table corruption problems that often happen with MySQL. The database of Firebird is just present in one file. This is ranked as the number 4 solution in the top Open source database.
