Firebird is a relational database comprising many ANSI SQL-99 features that runs on Linux, Windows and various UNIX platforms. This software provides excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. Since 1981, Firebird is in use in production systems under different names.

Firebird is an open source project, which is developed by the C and C++ programmers, technical advisers and supporters based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now Borland Software Corp) on 25th July 2000 under the InterBase Public License v.1.0. The open source software community is continuously working on this project to add more features and to enhance the quality of the software.

The latest release of Firebird is 1.5.1, which represents a commitment by the project to develop and deliver ongoing improvements to this popular open source database engine. This release adds a charset improvement allowing use of NONE as a fully transparent charset everywhere. It adds the config-driven ability to abort a server process in the checks of bugchecks or structured exception.

Firebird database should not be confused with the newly renamed Firefox web browser, which was also called Firebird for some time.