After a lot of thought and discussion with other core team members, I have decided to discontinue the development of the firebird dataprovider project (under the DNN core projects) due to the following reasons
· Limited or no additional resources have been willing to help out to completing the last piece left before we could release this to the general public (i.e. the ability of creating the foreign key constraints in Firebird during the creation of the tables/procedures – Firebird 1x had a restriction where only a single user can be connected to the database during the creation of the foreign key constraints. Due to the connection pooling nature of web applications, it was not possible to bypass this requirement (at least as far as I know).
· Related to the first item, I could have attempted to finish this piece off, however when we started this project, I had assumed that other volunteers will sign up with us to maintain this project moving forward. There were a few people who helped out in the early stages (and my deep thanks to them for helping out), but for one reason or another, most of them are no longer actively involved with the provider.
· SQL Server Express has been released as a free database and one of the compelling reasons when we started off this project was to be able to run DNN (open source application) on a free database (i.e. Firebird).
· Ability to be able to support the numerous modules that come with the core is a mighty task for just one person – I know this from personal experience managing the oracle version of DNN and I honestly don’t believe I can carry on with two dataproviders solely by myself.
· Lack of interest in the general DNN community.
My thanks go to Michael Washington (especially) and other core team members for supporting me in trying to develop this project and I look forward to working with the core on other projects as well as any other tasks that come up on an ongoing basis.