After I received a lot of heat about my post regarding why I find MySQL to be so bad (part I) – (mostly behind the scenes), I decided to also write something about Firebird SQL.
The first time I worked with Interbase was back in 2002, when I started working in a new work place where I needed to get into an existing Delphi + PHP code. The main database engine there was Interbase 6.1 and I have upgraded it to 6.5. All that was running on RedHat 7.3 Linux server, and a Windows 2000 desktops. Naturally, the database and Apache+PHP ran on Linux.
Interbase was the first database I had experience with that I actually felt was serious enough to work with. However, we had a lot of problems with it. There was no usage of RAID or shadow databases to the working copy of Interbase, and the hard-drive that was in use, had bad sectors, where some of the database data actually existed. So the first thing I have learned about Interbase was how to recover data rather then how to actually work with it.
Since then, I always monitored and tested the Firebird database – the main open source development off-shoot of Interbase 6.1.
After several problems with MySQL databases on production servers (costing money to my clients due to documented problems with the database), I started looking for an alternative for the development of my tools – in cases where I can decide what is the database that is involved (usually when the customer does not care, as long as it works). So I'm playing again with few "demo" apps that I write using Firebird SQL, and I really enjoy working on it.
That's my foreword about Firebird/Interbase (because they are not that familiar to people).
Now to my original intention: להמשיך לקרוא
