I am Adrian (Popa Marius Adrian) — a software developer from Romania 🇷🇴 and a long‑time Firebird RDBMS contributor (@FirebirdSQL member, 40+ PRs across the org).
I build and maintain open‑source tooling around Firebird: the desktop admin GUI, export/copy utilities, a web frontend, drivers, and the CI and containers that ship them. Lately I've been pushing Firebird into places it hasn't been before — the browser (WASM), Kubernetes, vector search, Rust, and LLM assistants over MCP.
- 🔭 Maintaining FlameRobin — the cross‑platform Firebird admin tool, shipping releases roughly monthly
- 🧪 Building fbvector (pgvector‑style similarity search for Firebird) and electric‑firebird (Firebird embedded in WASM)
- 🦀 Experimenting with fire‑crab — incremental C++→Rust conversion of the Firebird engine, differential‑tested against the real one
- 💬 Ask me about Firebird, SQL, database internals, C++, or FreePascal
- 🌐 reea.net · ✍️ mapopa.blogspot.com
A lightweight, cross‑platform admin & development GUI for Firebird 2.5 → 6.0+, written in modern C++ with wxWidgets. Beyond the classics (metadata browser, data grid, DDL editor), it now does JSON field editing, temporal tables, query‑plan visualization, a vector data editor, and an embedded MCP server so AI assistants can talk to your database directly. → flamerobin.org
Tools
| Project | What it is | Tech |
|---|---|---|
| flamerobin | Cross‑platform admin & dev GUI for Firebird. Vector editor + built‑in MCP server. | C++ / wxWidgets |
| fbexport | Import/export data and run SQL scripts; FBCopy copies and compares data across databases. | C++ |
| gmarathon‑freepascal | The Marathon SQL IDE, ported from Delphi to Lazarus/FreePascal. | FreePascal |
| firebirdwebadmin | Administer a Firebird server from the browser. | PHP |
| perl-dbd-firebird | DBD::Firebird — the Perl DBI driver. |
Perl / XS |
Firebird, in new places
| Project | What it is | Tech |
|---|---|---|
| fbvector | Vector storage and similarity search as a Firebird UDR — L2, cosine, inner product, L1 — SIMD‑accelerated with Google Highway. Think pgvector, for Firebird. |
C++ |
| electric‑firebird | The real engine compiled to WASM, running in the browser with no server. PGlite‑style async API. → live demo | TypeScript / WASM |
| cloudnative‑firebird | Kubernetes operator with a FirebirdCluster CRD, in the spirit of cloudnative‑pg. |
TypeScript |
| fire‑crab 🔥🦀 | Incremental C++→Rust conversion of the engine, bottom‑up from the storage layer, differential‑tested against upstream from the first commit. | Rust |
Explaining the database
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| FBSimCity | An explorable isometric city that shows how Firebird actually works — Y‑valve, DSQL, page cache, latency. → live demo |
| conceptual‑architecture‑for‑firebird‑paper | The Waterloo conceptual‑architecture paper on Firebird, updated and re‑diagrammed. |
The upstream drivers I use, package, test against, or send patches to:
| Language | Driver | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 🐘 PHP | FirebirdSQL/php-firebird | PDO + interbase extension |
| 🐍 Python | FirebirdSQL/python3-driver · nakagami/pyfirebirdsql | official & pure‑Python |
| 🐹 Go | nakagami/firebirdsql | database/sql driver |
| 🌐 Node | hgourvest/node-firebird · asfernandes/node-firebird-driver | pure JS & TypeScript |
| 🐪 Perl | mariuz/perl-dbd-firebird | maintained here |
| 💎 Ruby | rowland/fb | extension library |
| 🦀 Rust | fernandobatels/rsfbclient | native & embedded |
| ☕ Java | FirebirdSQL/jaybird | JDBC |
| 🟣 .NET | FirebirdSQL/NETProvider | ADO.NET / EF Core |
| 🐳 Docker | FirebirdSQL/firebird-docker | official images |
- Languages — C++ · FreePascal · PHP · Python · TypeScript · Go · Rust · Perl · Shell
- Data — Firebird · SQLite · PostgreSQL · vector search & embeddings
- AI — Model Context Protocol (MCP) · LLM‑assisted database tooling
- Build & ship — GitHub Actions · GitLab CI · Docker · CMake · Meson · wxWidgets
🌐 reea.net · ✍️ Blog · 👤 LinkedIn · 🐘 Mastodon · 🦋 Bluesky · 🧵 Threads · ✉️ Email
❤️ If FlameRobin or any of this is useful to you, consider sponsoring.