Firebird is derived from Borland InterBase 6.0 source code. It is open source and has no dual license. Whether you need it for commercial or open source applications, it is totally FREE!
Firebird technology has been in use for 20 years, which makes it a very mature and stable product.
Below is a list of some of the Firebird’s major features:
- Full support of Stored Procedures and Triggers
- Full ACID compliant transactions
- Referential Integrity
- Multi Generational Architecture
- Very small footprint
- Fully featured internal language for Stored Procedures and Triggers (PSQL)
- Support for External Functions (UDFs)
- Little or no need for specialized DBAs
- Almost no configuration needed - just install and start using!
- Big community and lots of places where you can get free and good support
- Optional single file embedded version - great to create CDROM catalogs, single user or evaluation versions of applications
- Dozens of third party tools, including GUI administrative tools, replication tools, etc.
- Careful writes - fast recovery, no need for transaction logs!
- Many ways to access your database: native/API, dbExpress drivers, ODBC, OLEDB, .Net provider, JDBC native type 4 driver, Python module, PHP, Perl, etc.
- Native support for all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS, HP-UX and FreeBSD.
- Incremental Backups
- 64bits builds available
- Full cursor implementation in PSQL
- Monitoring tables
- Connection and Transaction Triggers
- Temporary Tables
- TraceAPI - know what happens in your serve