To celebrate 10 years of the Firebird open source database and the coming release 2.5, the community behind the software has organized a promotional campaign called "Mind the Bird!". IN case you don't know, Firebird started when Borland decided to open source Interbase and later changed their mind. At that point the existing source code as used as a starting point for this open source project. Even if Firebird has a niche role in the open source database world, its technical qualities really shine and its license is fully open (unlike that of the most famous of the open source DBs, MySQL).

Because of the history of the products, both Interbase and Firebird have had a very high adoption rate among Delphi developers, and it was new in Delphi 2010 the official support for Firebird in Delphi's dbExpress architecture, with a specific driver. This will be the core topic I'll cover in my webinar, part of the MindTheBird campaign.

Info is at http://www.mindthebird.com/benefits.html, summary is below. Actual webinar signup will be available in the coming days.

Time: April 27, 2010, GMT+3 -- Title: Delphi and Firebird, by Marco Cantu (in English)

Description from Marco Cantu: "Since many Delphi developers use Firebird, Embarcadero recently added a native and specific Firebird driver to its dbExpress architecture.

In this session I'll offer an overview of how this driver works in terms of accessing to data and metadata, cover some of the alternative Delphi database access solutions for Firebird, and talk about the status of Delphi and of its relationship with the open source database server."

Notice that this is not the first webinar of the series, with two others by Dmitry Yemanov on "uperClassic Firebird - new architecture in Firebird 2.5" and by  Ann W Harrison on "Technological history of Firebird - 3 decades of innovations" have been given and can be downloaded from the webinars page above.

I've always had a good relationship with Firebird, which powers some of my web sites and projects, along with Interbase and Advantage Database Server, probably the three database systems I've used most over the recent years.