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homebrewer | 5 days ago

I'd also like to draw attention to the parent project Firebird. For some reason (probably its ties to Borland/Delphi?) it never became widely popular, even though it combines SQLite's ease of use with a proper fully featured database engine.

For example, it supports proper ALTER TABLE which doesn't force you to recreate tables and copy data around when you go beyond the most trivial use cases.

This is pretty much the only discussion I've found on this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22155260

discuss

order

exabrial|5 days ago

Just curious, because I don’t know, Postegres is all the rage, MySql is the og, where does Firebird carve its niche?

homebrewer|5 days ago

These days, feature-wise, it's probably somewhere in the middle. It had support for things like window functions long before they became available in MySQL and friends.

What it gives you over both is single-file databases which are easy to share, and in-process embedded mode, just like SQLite.

Unlike SQLite, it doesn't only support embedded mode, but can also be turned into a "server" DBMS that supports remote access from multiple clients (like MySQL/PostgreSQL). Hundreds of concurrent connections work fine from what I've seen. This can be changed in either direction at your discretion, the database file remains the same.

re-thc|5 days ago

> Postegres is all the rage, MySql is the og

From "influencers" i.e. YouTubers?

OG real world was Oracle and SQL Server.

whartung|5 days ago

My favorite anecdote relating to Firebird/Interbase (its original name) is that it is supposed to be renowned for its durability (i.e. resistance to corruption) and fast start times.

Because of this, they used it within the internal systems of the M-1 Abrahms tank.

Apparently when the main gun is fired, it gives off such a powerful energy impulse, that there is (at least was) a tendency for it to crash the internal systems.

So, they adopted Interbase because of its ability to work well in an environment where hard computer crashes are more a norm than an outlier.