There has been a series of acqusitions amongst database companies. Oracle bought InnoBase Oy and Sleepycat, two makers of transactional storage engine for MySQL. MySQL AB has then acquired Netfrastructure, a web aplication development framework. However, what MySQL AB actually acquired is not just the company + its software, but the main brain behind it. Firebird News reports that Jim Starkey, the founder of Netfrastructure, who also happened to be the father of the once open-sourced Interbase, has left his development on Vulcan, the next generation SMP-capable Firebird, to work full-time on another open source database engine.
That sucks. Especially when you know that your project would greatly benefit from Vulcan which might integrate with the up-coming Firebird 3.0 — provided that Firebird 2.0 is out of door soon. Looks like there will be at least a year away from SMP-capable Firebird.
But all the best Jim! Though I don’t believe that there is no intersection between MySQL and Firebird’s target audiences (especially when MySQL is scaling up for features and Firebird is scaling down for embeded systems), I believe Jim’s work there will bring open source RDBMS to another level, competing with other commercial heavy weights.
“That sucks. Especially when you know that your project would greatly benefit from Vulcan which might integrate with the up-coming Firebird 3.0 — provided that Firebird 2.0 is out of door soon.”
Don’t FUD it, please. Vulcan is near finished and is being actively developed by people at SAS who support Firebird in it’s fullest.
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Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions – developer tools for Firebird and MySQL
http://www.upscene.com
Martjin,
There is no point for me to FUD about it. In fact I have been breathing IB6/FB almost everyday since it has been released as open source. Our project of the last 5 years runs exclusively on Firebird, and would greatly benefit from Firebird 3 if it is available. In fact we are currently working with Helen B and Paul B trying to get some “independent evaluation” work done, as our prospects have doubted FB would scale.
It is great to hear that Vulcan is actively developed. But the question is still the same — will we see Firebird 2.0 in 1st quarter 2006 as stated in the roadmap?
“But the question is still the same — will we see Firebird 2.0 in 1st quarter 2006 as stated in the roadmap?”
That’s up to the current Firebird developers. Jim had -nothing- to do with Firebird 2, so I doubt this change will influence that.
Good to know you still believe in Firebird :-)
So do we.
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Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions
“Good to know you still believe in Firebird :-) So do we.”
Yeah. It does get tough when clients automatically assume that everything that is not MSSQL server is no good. :(
But we have been happy that we picked IB6 (and later on FB) when we started.
Cheers,
Hmm, Scott, your conclusions are probably not FUD by design, but you certainly are demonstrating your own fear, uncertainty and confusion.
To comment on a few things: first of all, the Vulcan code belongs to Firebird Project and nothing has changed in the plan as a result of Jim’s new job. The Vulcan threading framework and Firebird 2 code are being merged as Firebird 3. Firebird 2 is on schedule for release soon and Vulcan was never going to be part of it. The Fb2 tree has been tagged for release candidate 1, and that release will happen just about as soon as I can get the release notes up to date, i.e. next week or soon after.
Second, Jim still has some tidying up to do so that we can release a beta build of Vulcan. If he can’t get that sorted in the time-window he has left, it’s going to mean some reallocation of resources in the core team for Fb 3. If there’s a delay in anything from loose ends in Vulcan, it will be the Vulcan beta that takes the hit, not Firebird 2.
Third, Firebird’s destiny is in the hands of the Firebird Admin group, not Jim. While it’s often been handy to have Jim around for his depth of knowledge of the far reaches of the original sourcecode and his willingness to spend hours writing emails to lists, he’s not and never has been (by his own choice) a driving force in the Fb project. If it’s actually *true* that MySQL AB is going to use him to put a real RDBMS behind MySQL, he won’t be around Firebird as much as he has been over the last couple of years–probably not much at all–but his moving to new job doesn’t mean he’s going to his death or having his hands ripped off! ( Well, hopefully not! although MySQL AB hasn’t announced anything yet…. :-) )
Cheers,
Helen Borrie, a member of Firebird Project Admin
Helen — you are right. There is absolutely no point for me to spread FUD for my own gain, but it is natural to demonstrate FUD when something you depended upon appears to be under threat.
Just a head up for you guys. We have just deployed FB 2rc1 on one of the production boxes yesterday and have setup a test site to use it. We were a bit reluctant to use a release candidate on production boxes but 1.5.3 was locking up our app server badly under certain configuration. So far it runs beautifully.
So, as of Summer 2009, what is the status of the Vulcan project? I can’t seem to find a firm answer to that question.
@James — I pretty much gave up. Might as well move to MSSQL server…