Firebird is the project name given to the continued development of Borland's open source InterBase release during the summer of 2000. An open source RDBMS, the original Firebird grew from the open source release of InterBase 6.0 and is, as of this writing, available in stable 1.0 and Alpha 1.5 versions. The Firebird project operates independently and is not tied directly to Borland.

Multiple platforms are supported by Firebird. New releases are targeted typically to Windows and Linux, but are followed soon after by Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris versions. Additionally, individual ports have been done for FreeBSD, DEC VMS, and AIX, among others.

Firebird is offered with two separate execution models. The "Classic" model allows for the direct access and opening of databases by client programs (multi-client access is, however, supported) while the "Super Server" architecture provides a client/server architecture wherein clients may not open the DB directly and must route SQL requests to the server via a socket (the Win32 builds offer only the Super Server model in version 1; the next version is expected to add a classic version for Windows).

Firebird numbers among its features those of the original InterBase 6 release; including ANSI SQL-92 entry-level conformance; trigger support including unlimited triggers per record change, multiple triggers per action, and cascading triggers; online backup capability, and a capacity of nearly two billion rows per table.

Version 1.0 is available now as a stable release; version 1.5, recoded in C++, is currently available as an Alpha version. Visit the Firebird/Sourceforge site for further information.