SearchOpenSource has an interview with Douglas Levin, CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Black Duck Software. Levin has been working behind the scenes with prospective open source vendor buyers and sellers. "I think that Oracle will make other acquisitions through the year, to get into new markets, acquire new customers and acquire technologies that enable them to leverage new technologies in their installed customer base."

Oracle might be looking at acquiring InterBase and thus have a powerful tool to fight SQLServer in its home turf. It would be hardly more expensive than InnoDB. Interesting times...

Upscene Productions is proud to announce the next version of the popular logging/auditing suite for InterBase and Firebird. Main changes in this release: Firebird 2.0 support, revamped GUI, improved Prepare-Wizard, proper support for newly introduced keywords as object names, bugfixes.

Silicon.com writes: "MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money Oracle offered." Mickos also said: "We are not used in all the ERP stuff." Of course not, that is where Firebird is used.

The February edition of the magazine brazilian magazine "Pequenas Empresas/Grandes Negócios" (Small companies/Great business) brings an article in the technology section that gives some tips about choosing a database. Firebird is among the listed options.

"Open source databases such as MySQL, Cloudscape and Firebird are still years away from offering a viable, enterprise-ready alternative to existing commercial offerings from the likes of Oracle and IBM," according to Gartner vice-president Donald Feinberg. He also said that Linux and SQLServer were not enterprise ready. Sure.

Apparently, the $18 million MySQL raised from SAP and Intel was not enough to buy SleepyCat, and Oracle beat them to it. MySQL's customers must be feeling quite uncertain now. Some competitors have argued that not being owned by a single company is a weakness for Firebird. It is actually it greatest strength.

This document outlines how much Firebird conforms to the current SQL standard, "SQL2003" Please note that the information is not a full statement of conformance, but just information for those interested in the subject.

Upscene Productions are proud to announce version 2.8.1 of Database Workbench, the next major release of their popular cross database engine developer tool. Version 2.8.1 includes enhancements for Firebird 2 and many other enhancements.

We are proud to present our new tool and service to undelete records in InterBase and Firebird databases. IBUndelete is the only tool which can undelete occasionally deleted records in InterBase or Firebird databases. It uses IBSurgeon core engine for direct work with data inside database.

The Lazarus team is glad to announce the 0.9.12 release. This release is based on fpc 2.0.2 and the binary packages now contain many standard packages. This release can be downloaded from the sourceforge download page. Lazarus supports Firebird through the SQLdb package that comes with the IDE.