Why does Commtest use Firebird as the database engine in Ascent?
ANSWER Firebird is the most established and highly regarded of the open source databases. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981 and is based on the Interbase source code released by Borland Software Corp in July 2000. The Firebird software is free to own, register, license and deploy meaning that customers are not required to pay for database licenses or additional development costs, reducing the total cost of product ownership. Firebird offers virtually every common feature available in high-end databases without any significant impact on computer or network performance. Commtest software has been optimized to take advantage of the strengths of Firebird. It uses components that perform 2-5 times better than commonly available equivalents and takes advantage of the full range of database features to minimize database access, further improving performance. Firebird, and its previous incarnation as the Borland Interbase RDBMS, has been used with Com
