Webstack - Firebird

This should probably be it's own top level book rather than an element of the webstack, but for now it is just a major element of making my seb services work.

The Firebird basics 

What I have been trying to find is a clean description on just what Firebird is, whithout much success. SO I will have to write one from scratch ... although Ionos has a good starting page!

Historic Notes

The information on Firebird in Wikipedia is a little out of date, and the fairly common header about it not meeting standards are a few years old. Something to add to my road map I think. I have at least fixed the link to Whats Happening to InterBase? even if it does still say that it's dead.

The history of Interbase is recorded at the firebirdsql site. Which also links to Claudio's history timeline at least history up to 2004 when it was last updated. I also like his take on how Interbase came about.

My own history fills in a little more detail but needs a lot more fine detail, such as my own involvement for a number of years as the treasurer of the foundation. I'm currently running all the live sites on Firebird 5 and have not needed to do anything to the databases to do that, which is one of the things I have enjoyed even back to the days when I was paying for Interbase licences. It was the announcement by Borland that they were end of lifeing Interbase which caused much concern since many of us had invested in it for our buisness activities. Firebird just works as the replacement even if Borland realised their mistake a little too late.

The integration of Firebird into Libreoffice was another positive to me since I had been using Libreoffice since before it was forked for much the same sort of reasons as Firebird.

A lot of existing material can be found on lsces.uk but the plan is to provide a clean set of material for the current setup on this site.