User survey - how and why do you you use firebird_fdw? And what features are missing?

[ibarwick]

Hi

As the maintainer of firebird_fdw, I'd be very interested to know how and why people are using it. Answers to some or all of the following questions would be highly appreciated; feel free to contact me at barwick {at} gmail.com if you don't want to leave a reply here.

• Please describe how you use firebird_fdw.
• Which PostgreSQL version(s) do you use it with?
• Which Firebird version(s) do you use it with?
• Are there any features you'd like to see?

Any other constructive feedback is more than welcome.

[mkgrgis]

 Please describe how you use firebird_fdw.

For access to legacy industrial DBs (1990th) and for school students for RDBMS studies. For industrial DBs is very important to call FB's procedure's code in SELECT ... FROM procname(p1, p2...) style. Which PostgreSQL version(s) do you use it with? Along all times only 11+. Usually the latest from postgresql.org repository. Which Firebird version(s) do you use it with? 2.5 or older for legacy industrial DBs, 3.0 for my projects and school students. Are there any features you'd like to see? Translation of arrays. Translation of BLOB<->bytea. Yes, this features need hard memory manipulations and guarantees against memory leaks.

[mbecroft]

I support a manufacturing facility where the ERP is a COTS product based on Firebird...version 1.5, can you believe it. My job is to integrate this with MES (Manufacturing Execution System) i.e. the factory floor and all the people and equipment found there, integrate work order issuing from the ERP, and provide major additional features, reports and automated workflows/integrations. firebird_fdw has been essential for interfacing with the ERP and implementing these things.

One thing I love about postgres, which this exemplifies, is it can be a fantastic hub to join together disparate systems. Often middleware is not needed - PG does the job.

So far we've successfully worked around the limitations of firebird_fdw and even submitted PR's for a few issues we encountered, but all of these have since been addressed by you. It's great to see this is not a dead project.