Some Analytics

Known new Firebird installations (direct via the /afterinstall page) between 4th June 2011 and 31th July 2013 (since the transition to new Firebird website)

Total: 1,584,731

The following numbers don't just count only the above direct visits (as there are about 1%-2% of installs coming from other sources)

By Country:

1. Brazil    555,483
2. Russia    160,982
3. Turkey    104,448
4. Poland    75,960
5. Germany    65,597
6. Ukraine    57,509
7. South Korea    46,202
8. China    44,076
9. Italy    38,526
10.USA        33,064
11.Mexico    26,688
12.Spain    25,654
13.Czech Rep.    25,035
14.Indonesia    22,732
15.Colombia    21,964
16.France    21,758
17.Bulgaria    19,602
18.(not set)    16,827
19.Belarus    16,414
20.South Africa    14,466
21.Japan    14,289
22.UK        13,314
23.Hungary    11,189
24.India    10,451
25.Malaysia    10,421

Others are below 10,000

By Sub Continent Region:

1. South America    604,253
2. Eastern Europe    381,068
3. Eastern Asia        114,604
4. Western Asia        113,098
5. Western Europe    109,585
6. Southern Europe    84,432
7. South-Eastern Asia    55,412
8. Northern America    37,434
9. Central America    31,323
10.Northern Europe    24,592

By Continent:

1. Americas    676,227
2. Europe    599,677
3. Asia        308,592
4. Africa    37,020
5. (not set)    16,827
6. Oceania    10,008

We know that Brazil is the world leader in Firebird installations (one installation of Firebird per 362 citizens), but it still quite amazing that one single South American country has more Firebird installations than Europe in total.

Third place for Turkey is very interesting. I wonder what they are using Firebird for? It must be something quite large as 100k installations is not a small amount (one Firebird installation per 725 citizens, where for example the Russian Federation has one installation per 881).

Fourth for Poland is not so surprising, but perhaps it does indicate that it would be a good place for some kind of regional Firebird event.

South Korea and China taking 7th and 8th place is also interesting. Although total numbers are "small" for China, almost one hundred thousand installations combined is an interesting foothold. (It's about 1/3 of the approximately 300,000 installations in Asia). We previously assumed that the strong regional leader was Japan (installations per capita), but it's actually South Korea with one Firebird installation per 1086 citizens)

So we took these 1,584,731 servers and calculated an equivalent cost of buying InterBase for a single user at (200.00 Euros + 38.00 VAT), then thats a saving to Firebird users of  377 million Euros, or 2,262 million Euros if these installations were all translated into 10 user servers (1,200.00 Euros + 228.00 Euros VAT), or
4,714 million Euros if they were all 25 user servers (2,500 Euros + 475.00 VAT).

Very little of those savings make their way back to the Firebird project (less than 0.1%), assuming that we took the lowest figure (377 Million Euros) indicated by single user installs.

(cuurent prices taken from Embarcadero online shop)

IBConsole

I had to do some research on behalf of a customer, to see how viable IBConsole (released with InterBase 6.0) would be with Firebird 2.5.2 Classic. (remember it was developed for SuperServer via the Services API only). The results were a little surprising.

1. Creating and adding users works
2. Sweep works
3. Backup works
4. Restore works (Although it does generate an access violation in the console on completion)
5. Transaction Recovery (limbo's) generates an unavailable database error.
6. Shutdown - Database shutdown completed successfully, database has been shut down
and is currently in single user mode. A gstat -h indicates that the database is in multi-user maintenace mode, so the database has been closed for maintenance and multiple connections are allowed only for SYSDBA or the database owner only.
7. Restart completes sucessfully, and gstat -h indicates that  the database is now in normal mode.
8. View Metadata generates a RDB$CHARACTER_SET not found error.
9. The SQL tool seems to work ok.

So in general - its still usable with some restrictions

Personally if you want a sraightforward tool,  I would recommend FlameRobin. Its free and it supports interactive SQL, backup/restore etc and user management. Its also cross platform so you can run it locally on Linux and MacOSX if you want.