Whether Firebird is a bad deal or not, well, that depends on what you
want to do. It definitely doesn't come with a nice, free front-end GUI
tool, but is a very nice back-end to which tools can connect. For
front-end, interactive stuff, people buy tools like Database Workbench
or IB Expert or use something free that is less user friendly (e.g.
IB_SQL). Then, you probably also need stuff to write programs accessing
the database, which stuff depends on your programming environment.
Myself, I use InterBase Objects with Delphi.

Firebird is completely different from Access, and also very different
from MySql. I wouldn't want to try to use Access with medium-to-big
tables (1 Gigabyte and above), and doesn't yet trust MySQL (never tried
it, just read on the Internet about how to write queries that presumably
run OK in older versions of MySQL, but actually put garbage into your
tables, and that there are four incompatible engines behind the hood,
each of them lacking useful parts). Recently, they did hire Jim Starkey,
the father of InterBase (predecessor of Firebird), and I expect him to
make great improvements to MySQL. PostgreSQL is a competitor to Firebird
that may be worth investigating, though of course, I'm amongst those
that are very happy with Firebird and have never felt the need to
consider other alternatives.

Maybe a good place to start would be to describe your need (there is a
lot of difference between 'I need a database that can store my private
photoes' and 'I am writing a program for a company that needs a
client/server database. In due time I expect the database to have 1
billion records and 5000 concurrent users') and ask whether people
recommend Firebird or another database for your requirements. Subscribe
to firebird-general@yahoogroups.com and send your question (I think that
list is more appropriate than this one for that kind of question). It is
a list with considerably less traffic than this one.

Set

Ryan wrote:

> Excuse me folks I was actually looking for something that said user
> interface, not setup_personal, this dosen't tell me anything, OK, I
> was also having issues on their website with not the images (possibly
> links) showing up.
> I am thinking this whole firebird thing was a bad deal, it was
> reccommended form a website that sells software for internet
> broascasting. They also had links yo MySql and some other databases
> but suggested that firebird was the place to start. Sorry for any
> inconvience. Please bear in mind this is my first attemnpt to setup a
> database.