Firebird Relational Database is a cluster of databases through JDBC.

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 Developer's 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 aren't 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;