From COKS - Open Source Center - Slovenia

Firebird
Developer	Firebird Project
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Relational database management system
License	IPL, IDPL
Website	www.firebirdsql.org

Firebird (sometimes erroneously called FirebirdSQL) is a relational database management system offering many ANSI SQL-2003 features. It runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Started as a fork of Borland's open source release of InterBase, the Firebird codebase is maintained by the Firebird Project at SourceForge.

New code modules added to Firebird are licensed under the Initial Developer's Public License (IDPL). The original code released by Inprise (as Borland was then called) is licensed under the InterBase Public License 1.0. Both licenses are modified versions of the Mozilla Public License 1.1.

Features

• Full support of Stored Procedures and Triggers
• Full ACID compliant transactions
• Referential Integrity
• Multi Generational Architecture (sometimes called MVCC)
• Very small footprint
• Fully featured internal language for Stored Procedures and Triggers (PSQL)
• Support for External Functions (UDFs)
• Little or no need for specialized DBAs
• Almost no configuration needed - just install and start using
• Big community and lots of places where you can get free and good support
• Optional single file embedded version - great to create CDROM catalogs, single user or evaluation versions of applications
• Dozens of third party tools, including GUI administrative tools, replication tools, etc.
• Careful writes - fast recovery, no need for transaction logs
• Many ways to access your database: native/API, dbExpress drivers, ODBC, OLEDB, .Net provider, JDBC native type 4 driver, Python module, PHP, Perl, etc.
• Native support for all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS.
• Incremental Backups
• 64bits builds available
• Full cursor implementation in PSQL