Free firebird software for linux

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-99 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms.

Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. Firebird Relational Database has been used in production systems and under a variety of names since 1981.

Firebird is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000 under the InterBase Public License v.1.0.


New code modules added to Firebird are licensed under the Initial Developers Public License. (IDPL). The original modules released by Inprise are licensed under the InterBase Public License v.1.0. Both licences are modified versions of the Mozilla Public License v.1.1.

Installing:

In order to install the firebird version of IB 6.0 you will need to perform the following steps:

1. Get the required packages:

Get the glibc update from RedHat, the one I used
was from ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.0/i386/glibc-2.2-5.i386.rpm

Get ncurses4 from
ftp://carrier.ision.net/pub/ftp.redhat.com/i386/en/RedHat/RPMS/ncurses4-5.0-2.i386.rpm
or another redhat mirror.

Get Firebird from
ftp://firebird.sourceforge.net/pub/firebird/release/FirebirdSS-0.9-1.i386.rpm

2. Prepare the installation:

Log in as root.
Use a plain text console to do this and be sure
that all Gnome desktops are closed.
(One user reported that the Gnome desktop
(apparently ICEwm)
blocked port 3050. I could not reproduce this
here, but it seems that it uses port numbers
that arent assigned in /etc/services for own
purposes)

3. Add localhost.localdomain to /etc/hosts.equiv:
echo localhost.localdomain >>/etc/hosts.equiv

4. Change to the directory where you have placed
the downloaded packages.

5. Install the glibc update:
rpm --install --force glibc-2.2-5.i386.rpm

6. Install libncurses.so.4:
rpm --install --force ncurses4-5.0-2.i386.rpm

7. Install Firebird:
rpm --install --force FirebirdSS-0.9-1.i386.rpm

8. Add /opt/interbase/bin to your path:
You can either change /etc/profile
or do
export PATH=$PATH: /opt/interbase/bin
or
change the profiles in your users home directories

9. Check that all went well:

Read /opt/interbase/SYSDBA.password
to get your SYSDBA password.

gsec -display
should display the list of known users
(SYSDBA only after a fresh install)

isql /opt/interbase/examples/employee.gdb
SQL> SHOW TABLES;
should display all tables from this database
SQL>quit;

Jaybird is JCA/JDBC driver suite to connect to Firebird database server. Historically Borland opened sources of type 3 JDBC driver called InterClient.

However due to some inherent limitations of Firebird client library it was decided that type 3 driver is a dead end, and Firebird team developed pure Java implementation of wire protocol.

This implementation became basis for JayBird, pure Java driver for Firebird relational database.

This driver is based on both the new JCA standard for application server connections to enterprise information systems and the well known JDBC standard.

The JCA standard specifies an architecture in which an application server can cooperate with a driver so that the application server manages transactions, security, and resource pooling, and the driver supplies only the connection functionality.

While similar to the JDBC 2 XADataSource idea, the JCA specification is considerably clearer on the division of responsibility between the application server and driver.

JayBird 1.5 provides extensions to some JDBC interfaces. All extension interfaces are released under modified BSD license, on “AS IS” basis, this should make linking to these classes safe from the legal point of view. All classes belong to org.firebirdsql.jdbc.* package.

JayBird 1.0 provided only pure Java wire protocol implementation. While being most effective in client-server setups (even more effective than native client libraries), it performed worser when connected to the server residing on the same host compared to native (C/C++/Delphi/etc) solutions. Reason is that type 4 driver communicates with the server using network sockets, which introduce additional overhead. Native client library has possibility to use IPC when connecting to the database on the same host. This might increase performance even by 100%.

JayBird 1.5 provides also type 2 JDBC driver that uses native client library to connect to the databases. Additionally JayBird 1.5 can use embedded version of Firebird relational database allowing to create Java applications that does not require separate server setup.

However type 2 driver has also limitations. Due to multi-threading issues in Firebird client library, it is not possible to access it from different threads simultaneously when running in local mode (IPC). In this case only one thread is allowed to access library at a time. Driver tries to provide needed synchronization.

Current implementation uses mutex that is local to the classloader that loaded JayBird classes. This poses some deployment limitations: firebirdsql.jar must be deployed so, that it is loaded by the system classloader. For standalone web containers like Resin or Tomcat, JayBird should usually be deployed in their lib/ directory. It is allowed to include it in the WAR archives, but if and only if it is guaranteed that only one application will access Firebird.

When accessing remote servers thread per connection policy applies. Driver provides necessary synchronization for this situation.

Embedded version of the server cannot be used on Linux systems in multi-threaded applications. In particular this makes embedded version of the server unusable for web applications, where usually each request is served in separate thread.

KInterbasDB project is a Python extension package that implements Python Database API 2.0-compliant support for the open source relational database Firebird and some versions of its proprietary cousin Borland Interbase.
In addition to the minimal feature set of the standard Python DB API, KInterbasDB also exposes nearly the entire native client API of the database engine.
Enhancements:
- At concurrency_level 1, it was possible for a deadlock to occur if KInterbasDB simultaneously raised an exception in one thread while executing a SQL statement in another. This problem did not affect concurrency_level 2. Thanks for Atsuo Ishimoto for reporting this bug.
- The official implementation of the automagic TEXT_UNICODE type translator (in the kinterbasdb.typeconv_text_unicode module) was missing support for the new character sets introduced in Firebird 2.0 (namely, the corrected version of UTF8, plus KOI8-R, KOI8-U, and WIN1258). Thanks to Oleg Deribas for bringing this to my attention.

ibWebAdmin is a web frontend for the Firebird and InterBase database server. ibWebAdmin project makes the attempt to support all features which Firebird and SQL are offering.
Even if this goal is unattainable, quite a few steps have already been done. By now ibWebAdmin has the basic functions for creating, deleting, modifying databases, tables, generators, triggers and domains. It lets you import, export, enter, edit, delete, query, browse your data. And some more ...
To execute this program you need, beside the Firebird or InterBase database server, an apache webserver with php support.
Enhancements:
- restored php4 compatibility by adding a php4 replacement for the php5-only array_combine() function

libdbi implements a database-independent abstraction layer in C, similar to the DBI/DBD layer in Perl.
Writing one generic set of code, programmers can leverage the power of multiple databases and multiple simultaneous database connections by using this framework.
The libdbi-drivers project provides the database-specific drivers for the libdbi framework. The drivers officially supported by libdbi are:
- Firebird/Interbase
- FreeTDS (provides access to MS SQL Server and Sybase)
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- SQLite/SQLite3
The following drivers are in various stages of completion and are supposed to be included into the next release:
- mSQL
- Oracle
Enhancements:
- This release fixes a packaging error in 0.8.2. There are no source code changes.

nsFB is an internal AOLserver database driver for the Firebird or Interbase database. It supports reading and writing BLOB data and ARRAY data.
nsFB project supports the full size of varchar (32765 bytes) or char (32767 bytes). Many configuration options are supported, such as charset, dialect, transaction isolation level, etc. All kinds of data types are supported, such as NUMERIC or DECIMAL
Enhancements:
- This release adds support for importing a file into a BLOB and writing a BLOB into a file.
- Hexadecimal or base 64 string representations of data can be read from or written to the database.

fb_shash is a UDF library for Firebird/Interbase. It implements hash and hmac interfaces to the openssl library.

It supports hash and hmac algorithms such as SHA1 and MD5. fb_shash supports BLOB data.