Now, this could be a very good opportunity for all of the other open source database servers particularly the most popular ones like Firebird and PostgreSQL. I’m particularly fond of Firebird (the InterBase offspring) and use it in many projects and did a lot of consulting to Delphi developers using it. Can this be the rise of Firebird?

I have a heavy-used website powered by LAMP stack (CentOS Linux,
Apache 2, MySQL and PHP). It started on a shared hosting so I had to
use MySQL. Year and a half later, I switched shared, virtual hosting
and not run it on a dedicated server. I decided to try Firebird to see
how it performs and also how it compares to MySQL in RAM usage, disk
usage, etc.

I’ve been using Codeigniter as my development platform and framework of choice since last year. Being a ten year PHP developer, Codeigner was a refreshing way of coding web apps with PHP.

Two documents have been added to Firebird documentation area
How the cache works in Firebird :
That is based on information Ann Harrison supplied on the firebird-devel list a while back. She has permitted me to document it and make a manual out of it.
And Firebird Internals :

Someone on support list asked about identity column in Firebird and how it can be managed easier and i remembered that identity is already supported firebird 3.0 so i fired up flamerobin and created a table with new identity column type similar to MySQL “auto_increment” or PostgreSQL “serial”

All major free distro have now latest Firebird stable version (2.1.3) available in their official repositories.

Here is the list of where firebird 2.1.3 is included or can be installed

Here is the guide on installing Firebird 2.5 from FreeBSD 8.1 Ports and creating your first test database also we show you howto install Flamerobin GUI (administation tool) and the PHP driver for it .
This was tested on fresh freebsd 8.1 on a virtual machine

Scott Guthrie recently posted article about New Embedded Database Support with ASP.NET. This made me think about other options, Firebird in particular, and advantages and disadvantages. What I’m going to do is to introduce Firebird Embedded here and compare with features Scott wrote.

I’d like to clarify some facts about Firebird and Firebird Foundation. I think right now is a correct time to remind how all these things are organized, because some messages about "crisis, firebird's death, low finances" and so on being spreaded around.