David I Announces Update 3 for D2005

In the chat with Dale Fuller yesterday, David I said that there will be an Update 3 for Delphi 2005. Cool

From Nick's Delphi Blog

Borland NOT Open Sourcing JBuilder

Read @ Nick's Delphi Blog

Looking for a robust database system?

Loke Kar Seng writes a long article about Firebird in the tech section of the Malaysia Star. If you need to pitch Firebird to someone, this is a pretty good article to send.

Read more

Firebird 2.0 Alpha 2 on the way

Anyone having pending checkins to the HEAD please either commit today
or defer your commit until the tree is tagged. If anyone knows about
some Alpha 2 release showstopper, please reply here. The tree will be
tagged tomorrow.


Dmitry

Firebird 2 Nightly Snapshot Builds

Daily snapshot builds of the Firebird 2.0 codebase for Windows are now available. These are intended for Firebird developers and experienced beta testers. It is generated automatically, and as such it is untested and comes with no guarantees.

IBExpert Version 2005.04.24 available!

HKSoftware announce that IBExpert Version 2005.04.24 is available for download.

Poor Boy’s Oracle - Open Source Oracle (and free)

"In the midst of my metamorphosis into a web-standards adherent, I
suddenly got bit (again) by the database bug. This is to blame, the
first really decent book written (in English) on the Firebird database
platform. In my efforts to “fill out the toolbox,” I’ve been searching
for a decent database platform that won’t kill my meager (read:
non-existent) budget." ....

Read more

Interview with FrontRange

Last week Angel Alexander Magaña announced that FrontRange would be using Firebird in its successful "GoldMine" product line. He kindly agreed to being interviewed and you may find some of his answers surprising...

Continued

Firebird + App on a USB stick

n the Firebird-General there was a very interesting thread about deploying Firebird on a USB stick. It works very well, as you can read in the Read comments section.

Read comments

SPGen Beta 5.

TECT Software announce the release of Stored Proc Generator (SPGen) Beta 5. SPGen is a freeware utility which automatically creates up to 6 default procedures for any Firebird or InterBase table.

http://www.tectsoft.net/Products/Firebird.aspx

Borland open sources JBuilder!!!

"Borland Software is releasing code from its core JBuilder integrated development environment (IDE) into the Eclipse open source community after a surprise drop in first-quarter sales. The company hopes to offset JBuilder's R&D expenses by putting the suite into Eclipse."

Borland open sources JBuilder By Gavin Clarke on The Register

Components4Developers news

kbmMemTable v. 5.00 Release Candidate 1

Now support Delphi 2005 Win32 and .Net
as fully safe code!

kbmMW v. 2.50.00

Apr. 19. 2005 - Release Candidate 1 - All Editions
Loads of new stuff, including:

- support for Delphi 2005 Win32 and .Net as fully safe code!
- Loadbalancing teaching/learning capabilities
- Indy 10 support
- SDAC3 database adapter support
- ODAC v5 database adapter support
- NativeDB database adapter support
- PostgreSQL DAC database adapter support
- Windows Performance Monitor support
- Native Java and C# client support
- Autoinc support for selected databases
- Field value change propogation to originating (client or server) datasets
- Many more statistical measurement points

and much more!

FogCreek considers to support Firebird wiithin FogBugz

Joel Spolsky says: "I've been seriously considering Firebird for a
future
release."
See: http://support.fogcreek.com/default.asp?fogbugz.4.1650.3

BTW: FogBugz is a project management system for software teams
(http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz)

The unofficial VisualCLX patch 3.8.1

The unofficial VisualCLX patch 3.8.1 is now available for download from
http://unvclx.sf.net It is a bugfix for the 3.8 patch.

At the moment only the 3rd party compatible patches are available. The
Delphi 6, Delphi 7 (incomp) and Kylix 3 (incomp) patches will follow in
some days.

Firebird in Mandriva 10.2 official!

Philippe Makowski wrote on general list:

Not, on the cd's (not enough space  :(  )
but there is an official rpm in the last offcial distrib

cf :
http://rpms.mandrakeclub.com/rpms/mandrake/official/10.2/i586/media/contrib/firebird-1.5.2.4731-0.2mdk.i586.html


and that before the merge with Connectiva.

Mandriva is new name of Mandrake after they have marged with Connectiva...

VulcanJ production ready

The VulcanJ test ware should be ready for general use now. I ran the sourceforge copy of the test ware last night against our build of Vulcan using S64, Windows XP, MVS, Linux, and R64 (AIX). The test ware worked on all hosts, although not all of the were clean against Vulcan. :)  I pushed some corrections this morning, to support FB2.0.

I ran VulcanJ against Firebird 2 on Windows this morning, using the snapshot build, Firebird Version: WI-T2.0.0.10711 Firebird 2.0 Alpha 1. It almost ran clean. There was a problem with CHECK constraints (4 tests) that was reported here earlier and that Dimitry was going to address. The only other problem is an issue where an extra null seems to be appended to error messages when using Jaybird (that I also see with Vulcan, but not FB1.5). I haven't been able to reproduce this problem outside of the Java environment. So, I had 5 failure/errors in total with the FB2.0/Windows.

I have added Adriano's request to include SET NAMES ASCII in some of the ISQL tests for internationalization reasons, and corrected the binary/ASCII problems from the initial push. And fixed Adriano's comment that output directories were not created properly when they did not exist. Thanks, Adriano!!!

I discussed privately with Pavel where to put the test ware, and for the time being, it will stay at firebird/VulcanJ in the source tree where it was initially pushed. Not ideal, but ok for now. Pavel is welcome to move it to where he sees fit later.

Please let me know your experience with the test ware, and if you find any problems.

-b

Bill Oliver
Product Specialist, Base SAS

New Firebird's slogan -- a summary

Firebird: The legend continues.
Firebird: Meet the Legend.
Firebird: Pure Power.
Firebird: Empower Yourself.
Firebird: Powerful, Reliable or Easy? Pick any three. (love this one,
but it's better for e-mail signature than general slogan)
Firebird: More than database.
Firebird: Solution that works.
Firebird forever.
Firebird: Plain sailing.
Firebird: What else?
Firebird: Simply clever. (but it's used by Skoda Auto)
Firebird: Inspired database.
Firebird: Just works.
Firebird: Smart technology.
Firebird: Proven solution.
Firebird: A database with vision.

Many slogans listed above could be mixed to make new ones, for example:

Firebird: Inspired Technology.
Firebird: Proven Technology.
Firebird: More than Technology.
Firebird: More than Solution.
etc.

Best regards
--Pavel

OS Car analogy

A bit of humour to lift people's spirit. A OS Car analogy article. Includes Windows, MacOSX, Linux, BeOS and Amiga.

Marketing buzz words for 2005/6

Firebird seems well positioned to take advantage of the marketing buzz words for 2005 and 2006. Hot topics are: OLTP and OLAP in one database (natural for our MGA design); ETL, "extract, transform & load" (easy with external tables) and low need for DBA attention (our hallmark). If marketing checklists are relevant we need to work on our XML features (XML datatype, XQuery).

Read more

All Firebird related products from TECT Software are freeware now!

TECT Software Ltd announces that all Firebird related products from TECT Software are available immediately under a freeware license. Products included are:

• Firebird/Interbase Backup Manager
• Firebird Helm Interface (FBHelm)
• Firebird/Interbase Stored Procedure Generator
• Firebird/Interbase Server Properties

ibpp - progress

"You know I always try to keep myself informed of your progress and issues so that I can pick up new needs for IBPP.
Unfortunately march 2005 has been quite badly exceptional for me (mainly health issues & work overload issues).
You heard quite nothing from me for some weeks and it will still be the case for 1 or 2 weeks (roughly until around April 20).
Though I'm back, reading news from this list and considering to complete some old unfinished work in IBPP "soon".
You should expect a new IBPP "stable" beta late this month or at least early in May (because beginning of May I'll be free from a work-charge and that should give me 10 hours free a week.

I wanted to tell you that the Blob interface received enhancements some weeks ago (this is checked in the HEAD of IBPP CVS, though I still do not recommend you to depend on the HEAD branch for the time being). You'll find the ability to directly read or write a blob to/from a std::string through the Statement::Get/Set methods, essentially short-circuiting completely the need to use a Blob temporary variable for simple use cases.

This feature at least is already heavily used in our private builds at TIP Group inside release commercial software. So I expect the beta of this next IBPP iteration will be very short.

There is also a Row concept, that, I expect, could be used to implement sort of client-side caching of rows when retrieving a dataset. But more on this later.

And the IBPP::Exception now inherits from std::exception allowing a better integration with standard compliants developments. (Look at the ibpp.h from CVS HEAD if you want to see the structure of this and not take wrong paths in between).

See you soon here, "

--
Olivier Mascia

SHA1 is now broken, should FB 2.0 still use it?

Bug Submitted By: Simon McKenna (hypersi)
Summary: SHA1 is now broken, should FB 2.0 use it?

Initial Comment:
>From README.sha1.txt:

"New hashing algorithm, selected for firebird 2.0, is
SHA-1"

However, some clever Chinese researchers have made
brute force attack on SHA-1 far more attractive:

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0503.html#1

I'm sure you fine folks already know this, but a
headsup just in case  :) 

peace
si


----------------------------------------------------------------------

>Comment By: Sean Leyne (seanleyne)

Date: 2005-04-04 12:36

While the SHA-1 algorithm has been cracked, and a
algorithm is now available to make the attack more possible.

The most important aspect of the article is:

"...On the software side, the main comparable is a 264
keysearch done by distributed.net that finished in 2002. One
article put it this way: "Over the course of the competition,
some 331,252 users participated by allowing their unused
processor cycles to be used for key discovery. After 1,757
days (4.81 years), a participant in Japan discovered the
winning key." Moore's Law means that today the calculation
would have taken one quarter the time -- or have required one
quarter the number of computers -- so today a 269
computation would take eight times as long, or require eight
times the computers."

This means that it would take **32 years or 2.4 million
computers** to find a matching SHA-1 hash!

Further the article continues:

"For the average Internet user, this news is not a cause for
panic. No one is going to be breaking digital signatures or
reading encrypted messages anytime soon. The electronic
world is no less secure after these announcements than it
was before."

Accordingly, there is nothing in the article which will affect
Firebird security and its use of SHA-1 for the foresable future.

Finally, there has already been much discussion of a new
feature to enable a plug-in security architecture which would
allow for users to implement their own security
tools/algorithms (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, or SHA-
512).  The implementation of the new security approach is
being discussed as a v3.0 feature.

VulcanJ, a Firebird regression test suite

We have developed a test suite which we run nightly to verify Vulcan functionality. This test suite, called VulcanJ, has over 800 tests that are a combination of ISQL tests and Java (JDBC) tests. There have been several cases where nightly runs of the test ware uncovered problems that would have been missed otherwise. We also run the tests before committing changes to our internal source code management system. I have now run the test ware against FB2.0, and would like to make it available to the community at large.

The test ware is based on Junit and Ant. VulcanJ will generate a HTML report which immediately shows where a problem is occurring. In the case of the ISQL tests, the HTML report also shows the comparison between the faulty run and the original benchmark run. Running the tests against FB2.0 generated 2 problems, one of which Pavel has entered a bug track on, and the other, which I posted here this week as a Vulcan problem, also shown up in FB2.0. VulcanJ also includes Java tests that are based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and customized for firebird-specific queries.

I have sent advance copies of the test ware to Roman and Pavel, and they have encouraged me to push my code to a new CVS module. I hope to push this test ware to a sourceforge next week (at firebird/VulcanJ), but if you want advance review I can send you a zip immediately. Detailed doc and usage instructions are included in the kit. There is a little bit of work left to do, to make sure I remove company-specific references in the source, but then I should be ready to push.

-b

Bill Oliver
Product Specialist, Base SAS

New version php4-interbase in Debian

I prepared a new version of php4-interbase. Gregorz, are you in a
position to sponsor an upload?

People on pkg-firebird-general might want to rush in
for the fun early to help testing.

Here is the changelog.

* New upstream release
* Acknowledging NMU. (Closes: #294000)
* Bump php4-dev build-dep to (4:4.3.10-10) to ensure
building without zts
* Remove the -zts phpapi. Urgency high as this
is release critical.(Closes: #301329)
* Updated copyright file to incorporate newer
version of the license
* Incorporated Czech translation (Closes: #274066)

The packages can be found here:

http://www.cd-uitleen.nl/debian/

Cheers,
Remco

FIBS 1.0.1 Firebird-Interbase Backup Scheduler

FIBS is a lightweight, solid and fast scheduler so as to meet most backup-tasks-needs. It uses firebird/interbase command line tool "gbak.exe" to backup safetly and mirrors it to any other disc or computer for extra protection against backup-disc crash. FIBS can create PKZip compatible compressed backup files, if user wants to. One of the noticable feature of FIBS is that it has multi-threaded architecture. Every backup process (including zipping) is executed in a separate thread. That is, there is no serialisation of backup process including zipping. Surely this means that high grade concurrency has been given to users to make them free to set lots of backup tasks just the same time.
It's been solved some potential scheduling problem with version 1.0.1.
[ED is free as in free beer :postcardware
Scroll down to awards]

New Backup in 3 sentences

Leyne, Sean on firebird-support

"Additionally, v2.0 includes a new backup tool (currently named NBackup)
which will allow you to:

- take a direct OS copy of a live/online database

- make an image copy of a live/online database

- create incremental database backups"

Debian:Request an adopter for the php4-interbase package

Remco Seesink wrote 

"I sent an RFA (request for adoption). In Debian terms that means I don't
have enought time available to do proper maintaining, but haven't given
up on the package yet (which would be orphaning). This is important
because holding on to a package while not maintaining it proper will
hurt users. But I still want to see this package make it into sarge in
good shape and I will do my best for that.

This means that a anyone is now free to take over maintainership of the
package. If you are not a Debian Developer it could be done through
finding a sponsor who is a Debian Developer and can check your package.
That is how I do it."

FireRuby 0.2.1

Announcing the release of version 0.2.1 of the FireRuby library. FireRuby is
a Ruby language extension that interfaces to the Firebird open source RDBMS.
No new functionality has been added for this release but a number of bug
fixes have been made. Please consult the README file for a list of the
changes.

The FireRuby project is currently hosted on the Ruby Forge site and can be
accessed at...

http://rubyforge.org/projects/fireruby/