Happy New Year!

I would like to wish a very happy new year to all Firebird and Delphi users and developers!
It seems that 2007 will be a very exciting year for Firebird, with two scheduled releases (2.1 and 3.0) and for Delphi as well, with two scheduled releases (Delphi Highlander and Delphi for Vista) .

Review: Borland Turbo Explorer

With the free Turbo Explorer line, Borland brings programming to the masses. Each of the four Turbo Explorer 'personalities' targets a different combination of programming language and platform: Turbo Delphi and Turbo C++ for Windows, and Turbo Delphi and Turbo C# for .NET. There are over 200 components for building programs, but the abundance of features may be overwhelming to new users.

Turbo Delphi - The Return!

Turbo Delphi - The Return! - In the good old days, Turbo Pascal was small, fast and inexpensive. Now Turbo Delphi is (we hope) small and fast. And it's free!

ZeosDBO Latest Download

Here is the link for the last ZeosDBO component (but it's not the stable version) http://users.telenet.be/mdaems/ at least you can know that the development of this component is still exist

FDD on TV

HardSoft TV presented in program #275 an interview with Carlos H. Cantu recorded during the 3º Firebird Developers Day. You can watch it online now (audio is in portuguese). In the next programs (released every 2 weeks), there will be other interviews with other FDD speakers.

Firebird Maestro

SQL Maetro - A new administration tool for Firebird Databases is available for download (windows only).

Meiji talks about FDD

Meiji Kimura posted an on-line article in IT-Media about Firebird Developers Day. Non-japanese speakers can try some online translation tools to be able to read the article.

FlameRobin 0.7.5 released

Source and binary packages for Windows (setup.exe and .zip) and Linux (gtk1 and gtk2 variants) are available for download. MacOSX and Debian/Ubuntu ones should follow soon (and probably FreeBSD one too). We are also looking for someone to try if things work on Solaris too.

New features
- System tables now are available in main tree view
- Compatibility with Firebird 2.0
- SQL editor: Autocompletion of column/parameter names and old/new aliases in triggers

Enhancements and Bug fixes
- SQL Editor: Use row:col instead of col:row in statusbar
- SQL Editor: Autocompletion now works for case
- sensitive object names
- SQL Editor: Autocompletion now works for names containing $ character
- Data grid: "Fetch all records" and "Cancel fetching all records" commands
- Data grid: "Copy records as Update" command
- SQL script execution now always stops on error
- Confirm dropping of items from main tree
- Fixed bugs related to character set conversions
- Fixed DDL extraction for various object types

Download at : http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=124340
For known issues please see our bug tracker at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=124340&atid=699234

1st Russian Firebird Conference

Dear Friends,

IBase, Inc is glad to announce The 1st Russian Firebird Conference. It will take place in Moscow, Russia, October 14, 2006.
Firebird Core developers, vendors of many related products and well-known enthusiasts will be there to present the most recent news and plans regarding Firebird 2, new versions of developers products and so on.

Check-in to conference (in Russian):
http://www.ibase.ru/conf2006_reg.htm

If you have any questions regarding participation or sponsorship please feel free to email conf@ibase.ru.

With best regards,
Alexey Kovyazin
IBase.ru
IBSurgeon.com

Where are the Mysql, Firebird books in your shop?

Did you seen the Firebird book in local shops ?
One mysql user is complaining that mysql books aren’t in the “database” area [ED: seems that he spoted one firebird book]

Using the ActiveRecord-JDBC Adapter

There has been one official release of the ActiveRecord-JDBC adapter, a 0.1 that has basic SQL support for MySQL.[Ed: Firebird support will be added soon , see bellow] …

We are planning a second release of the JDBC adapter very shortly. It should have reasonably solid migrations/DDL support for MySQL, Oracle, and Firebird, as well as some level of support for HSQLDB, Derby, and others. It’s moving along quickly now that it’s been spun off into its own jruby-extras project. You can go there or to the jruby-extras SVN repository to grab the bleeding-edge source from SVN.

GCafeSoft Update - blog

GCafeSoft is a program, written absolutely for Gaming Cafe owners.

The Server is a robust-.NET based application, based on the v1.1 .NET Framework. The database is also as robust an element in the Server — architecture being based on the Firebird Embedded Architecture.

dnfBB final beta available for download

dnfBB is a powerful and fast 3 Tier, C# / .Net discussion board or forum. With native support for multiple forums within the same database structure which fully utilises Firebird’s features (Stored procs, triggers etc)

The final beta version of dnfBB is now available for download, this version includes all the features that were allocated to Version 1. Without a doubt there will be a few imperfections to iron out before the final release, however as far as functionality goes this is now complete (Firebird version only at the moment).

URL’s
Home: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dnfbb/
Forum: http://dnfbb.fbtalk.net/

Firebird 2.0 on-line manual

I’ve placed the first book of a Firebird 2.0 manual on-line:
http://www.janus-software.com/fbmanual/

This book is about the stored procedure and trigger language “PSQL” and
consists of about 100 web pages. I would expect that all 8 planned
books will be online before the end of the year.

The on-line manual is user editable, in the sense that users can post
extra information, examples and corrections — in the style of the on-
line PHP manual.

All feedback is welcome.

Enjoy!

Paul

MySQL drops BerkeleyDB engine - what next?

Joe Brockmeyer writes: "With the 5.1.12 release, MySQL will be dropping the Berkeley DB (BDB) storage engine from its list of supported database engines. Some observers have suggested that this move is connected to Oracle's purchase of Sleepycat, and that InnoDB may be next. However, Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, says that they're unlikely to drop InnoDB, and the Berkeley engine is being dropped for technical reasons."

Read more

DevCo Developer Conference Moved to Q1 2007

The DevCo group within Borland had previously announced a Developer Conference for the fall of 2006. Now the conference has been officially delayed to "a date (to be determined) during the first quarter of 2007", to quote Christine Ellis. She continues saying that "No further information regarding specific dates or location is available at this time. The decision to postpone the Conference was based on many factors including conference location availability."

IBReplicator V2.1.10

IBReplicator V2.1.10 is now available for download. Updated information is available in the release notes.

How to connect InterBase database to MS SQL server

1. Install IBProvider on a server where MSSQL works.
2. Launch "SQL Server Enterprise Manager".
3. Connect to MSSQL server that will work with InterBase database.
4. Go to tree item "Sequrity\Linked Servers".

Read more

Oracle Takes Another Page From Open Source

"Every organization in the world has some form of Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes. And they want nothing more than to get off this technology or older technology that's not Web based or secure." And not every open source project is all that easy, he added. Look at the complexity of open source scripting language PHP. "It can be an esoteric language, and it can be difficult to read and understand some of the scripting language. With APEX, they have an easier time with declaratives, for example," Hichwa said.

Read more

Firebird,Flamerobin,KinterbasDB included in archlinux

Here are firebird package details , they have python-kinterbasdb+flamerobin included in the linux distro, If you don't know what is archlinux therea are some reviews on the distrowatch.org

Firebird inside: phpBB 3.0 Beta2

We are pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 Beta2 package . With this second beta release we are a great step forward. There is no update path provided due to a number of extensive database schema changes. Everyone having the first beta installed need to re-install the software. If you do a new installation, please be sure to also remove any remaining files, especially those within the cache folder.

Read more

Firebird and Visual Studio .NET 2005 Data Designer Access (DDEX)

There is a new chapter in the Firebird Tutorial for .NET : Firebird Data Access Designer (DDEX) installation . Follow these instructions to get Firebird support in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 (Standard and up): Browse Firebird databases in the Server Explorer Use "Configure Data Source" Wizard to configure SqlDataSource component Connection Properties editor etc. No need for Visual Studio SDK! Posted by Dan on the FirebirdDotNet Blog

Read more

Firebird marked as stable on gentoo linux sparc architecture

Here is the Firebird's Gentoo page (compiled with gcc4.1) and there is more info in the Changelog

Firebird inside: OroTimesheet

OroLogic uses firebird in their product OroTimesheet Here is what they say about firebird :) OroTimesheet 5 uses the database Firebird 1.5 to store its data. Firebird is a relational database that can be installed on Windows, Linux, Solaris and other platforms. Using Firebird with OroTimesheet 5 gives users a great reliability and stability (relational database), a low licensing cost (Firebird is free, only OroTimesheet 5 licenses must be bought).

Read more

Do Small Businesses Fear Open Source?

"Fully half of small and medium-sized businesses say they use little to no open source software. An additional 20% say they use it only for applications primarily used by IT. A key issue for emerging enterprises is the depth and quality of support available to deploy and troubleshoot open source software."

Read more

Firebird inside: "Help Desk for IIS"

Help Desk for IIS is a web-based help desk software solution for delivering customer service and support. It easily installs on your MS web server. All information is stored in a Firebird database, and the web pages themselves are produced by server-side ISAPI extension.

Read more

Sybase leaves Silicon Valley

While a wave of consolidation has racked the software world of Silicon Valley in recent years, John Chen, the chief executive of Sybase, has managed to stay under the radar and keep his company profitable. Starting in 1998, Sybase, a maker of relational database software, embarked on a mission to become a leader in the nascent market for mobile information.

Read more

Firebird *unofficial* FULL setup for Windows

See the project page www.parmaja.com/projects/firebirdsetup/ or directly download from here. It includes: Flamerobin GUI tool, FBMonitor tool, the FirebirdSQL FBConfig + alias manager, and FBServiceMonitor monitor. The full InnoSetup script is inlcuded so you can rebuild the setup again with your options.

Firebird drives more banking applications

A Russian company specialising in banking software has released a lite version of it's OLAP and datawarehouse system "Nostradamus", which is based on the Firebird open source RDBMS. The full version of "Nostradamus" software run on Oracle 8i and later. The system was made compatible with Firebird in all mostly used aspects, such as visual database table and view editor, glossary system, data sources and receivers with server-side logs support, reports etc. Basically this software is a toolkit for rapid [...]

Read more

The case for function based indexes - part two

Some time ago I wrote about function based indexes, showing a PostgreSQL based case, right now I'll show a Firebird based example, due to the fact that Firebird 2.0 supports Expression Indexes, which are my good old function based indexes. Read More on pabloj's blog

Firebird used in an large telemetry system - they need an developer

We are looking for a database developer to work on two related large scale utility radio telemetry projects. The development uses the Firebird (Interbase) database on a Linux platform with a web based user interface. The system connects large numbers of remote telemetry units with the database using custom radio hardware and communications Read More about the job description and system

On Embedded Firebird and nHibernate

Was experimenting with embedded Firebird today with nHibernate. Wanted to see if an embedded database could keep up with a highly proprietary flat file format for data lookups. Read More on this blog

InterBase on a Windows Cluster with Failover

Anders Melander posted these instructions for configuring InterBase on a Windows cluster with failover to the newsgroups a while back.

Hyper-Threading and Shared CPU Cache

Interesting post from Slava Oks on hyper-threading. The long and the short of it is that low-priority threads which touch a lot of memory can really hurt a high-priority thread on the other logical processor by trashing the shared cache. Yet another reason to disable hyper-threading on servers.

Using Pentaho with Firebird

To use Firebird as a database source for queries in your pentaho solution you need very little things

Flamerobin as a GUI for embedded Firebird - Howto

In general you just need to have Flamerobin connect to Embedded Firebird through local protocol, my setup with Firebird 1.5.3 is like this

Voting DevCo Conference Talks

You can vote for talks for the next DevCo Conference, although it seems few people have done that.

If you follow Delphi news, you probably know DevCo is hosting a Developer Conference next falls in the San Francisco Bay Area. As usual, potential speakers were invited to submit topics for their talks. Differently from the past, the panel in charge of the conference program has asked the community to vote for your 10 favorite topics. Voting taks place here. Notice you can both rate submissions and vote them, although it is not clear if rating will matter.

Source: Marco Cantu

Turbo Videos

A number of interesting videos have appeared on the DevCo Turbos web site, I guess more will be coming.

V.2.0 Release Candidate 4 Released with a Caveat

Release Candidate 4 for Firebird 2.0 should start to appear in the mirrors today. Unfortunately, due to a late-breaking issue that was reported and confirmed after these builds were in the system, it should not be treated as production-ready, yet.

The issue has been addressed and is undergoing QA now. RC 5 should appear before the end of the month. In the meantime, please look at the fixes between RC3 and RC4 and check that any issues you had have been satisfactorily resolved.

Firebird 2 Release Candidate 4

We are pleased to invite you to download your preferred binary kit for Firebird 2 Release Candidate 4. Though very close, this is still a field-testing release. Please check any problem areas you encountered in RC 3 and report to the Firebird-devel list without delay if something isn't working as you expect.
Please note also that this release will NOT become the final one, due to an issue that appeared after these builds were made.

Turbo News!

Be sure to go and Digg this article.

ComputerWorld Australia: Borland revives 'Turbo' for developer tools

Neil Rubenking in PC Magazine: New Borland Line Salutes Turbo Pascal Spirit

The Press Release: Borland's Developer Tools Group Announces Plans to Rev Up Classic Turbo(TM)

eWeek: Borland Brings Back Its Turbo Tools

Source: Nick Hodges

Delphi Wiki

A Delphi Wiki has been started on http://delphi.wikia.com. I think it's a brilliant idea and I hope it takes off well and becomes a great community resource. So please also spread the word to other Delphi developers.

Borland’s Developer Tools Group Announces Plans to Rev Up Classic Turbo™

Borland’s Turbo Pascal® Pioneered Early Software Development Tooling; New Turbo™ Products Offer a Fast and Easy Way to Develop Microsoft® Windows® and .NET Applications

CUPERTINO, Calif. — August 8, 2006 — Today, the Developer Tools Group of Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL) announced plans to release single language versions of Borland Developer Studio, the company’s development environment for Microsoft® Windows® and .NET applications. Bringing back the popular Turbo™ moniker, the new Borland Turbo products offer low-cost, language-specific rapid application development capabilities for students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers as well as individual professionals.

The Turbo product set includes Turbo Delphi® for Win32, Turbo Delphi for .NET®, Turbo C++® and Turbo C#®. Each version will be available in two editions: Turbo Explorer, a free downloadable version, and Turbo Professional, a version priced less than $500 which is designed to accept thousands of available third-party tools, components and plug-ins. All Turbo editions enable developers to rapidly build high performance GUI, Database, Web, and Web Services applications for Microsoft Windows. Turbo Delphi for .NET and Turbo C# support the Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET platforms. More information is available at www.turboexplorer.com.

A Separate .NET 3.0 and What it Means

Ricky Tan of Microsoft’s MSDN Blogs hints at an RTM within two months for the new .NET Framework 3.0, and leaves us to wonder just what that means for the .NET Developers out there. For those of you that haven’t heard, Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework is the new name for WinFX and .NET 2.0 bundled together.

Read more

Firebird-InterBase Backup Scheduler

FIBS (Firebird-InterBase Backup Scheduler) V2.02 is available.

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 GZip compatible compressed backup files if user want to save backup disc space.
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 compressing. Although this means that high grade concurrency is given to users to make them free to set lots of backup tasks just the same time, the main advantages resulted multi-threaded architecture is that backup tasks cannot be plugged by the others in trouble. Definitely this is a must-have for a reliable backup scheduling.
FIBS is designed to run on Win32 environment and to backup local and remote databases.

More Sun Lies About NetBeans

From Mark Damon Hughes:

This is an email I just received from one of Sun's mailing lists:

Borland says that it is no longer investing in developer tools. Don't
worry. We've got you covered.

Sun has the tools to meet your needs, and they're available at no
cost! With NetBeans you can easily migrate your applications from
JBuilder to the NetBeans IDE. Additionally, you can be rest assured
that your investment is protected through training, developer
certification, third-party components and technical support.

Of course, this is all blatant lies, and they should stop letting their filthy lying marketing scumbags stop writing to developers who are smarter than they are; of course, this would mean they'd have to stop writing entirely, which can only be a good thing.

While Borland, Inc. will soon no longer doing development tools, they are still investing in the development team (see Allen Bauer's blog for some current news), and are spinning off "DevCo" (which will probably get a new name) into a new company. So Borland's tools are not dead, nor are they being neglected during the transition. Everything Sun says and implies in that first paragraph is a lie.

There is essentially no third-party support for NetBeans, that is simply a lie. To reiterate from last time I checked, there were 34 plugins for NetBeans vs. 1094 plugins for Eclipse. Let's ask the source of all wisdom, if anyone is even interested: netbeans plugin finds 17,600 hits. jbuilder plugin finds 746,000 hits. eclipse plugin finds 13,100,000 hits.

You can easily migrate your Java projects to any IDE, if you use industry-standard ant build.xml files, so this means nothing. "Training, developer certification, [...] and technical support" are nice ways of saying that NetBeans is so awful and unusable that you'll have to ask Sun how to do anything, and they'll charge you for that information.

Sun, please stop lying in support of your awful IDE. Accept that it sucks, and move on.

Oracle: Open Source No Threat in Enterprise Database Space

Oracle is holding its own in the open-source database space, while not seeing any competition in the enterprise database market from open-source companies, Bob Shimp, the vice president of Oracle’s technology business unit, told eWEEK July 31.

Read full article here.

FB 2.0 RC4 is coming…

The releases notes for FB 2.0 RC4 is already available here. Installers and binaries are currently being built.

Huge success case using Firebird!

DBA Software, provider of manufacturing (MRP) solutions for small business, announced that its decision two years ago to base its flagship product, DBA Manufacturing Next-Generation, on the Firebird open-source SQL database has been an unqualified success.
(…)
“Our free single-user system, which anyone can download from our Website, is testimony to Firebird’s ease of installation,” continued Zumwalt. “Over the past 18 months, more than 10,000 companies have downloaded and successfully installed our manufacturing software without any support assistance.”

Read full article here.

3rd Firebird Developers Day - Report

The report about the 3rd edition of the Brazilian Firebird Developers Day is now online in both portuguese and english. The main index allows you to check reports of the previous editions too.

VistaDB 3.0 - World’s First Fully Managed Embedded SQL Database

The SQL databases available for the .NET Framework today, including Microsoft SQL Server 2005, SQL Everywhere, MySQL and Firebird are all based on unmanaged architectures. Therefore when developers create .NET Framework-based applications that embed any of these SQL databases today, the result is an unmanaged application that does not conform to Microsoft’s guidelines. VistaDB 3.0 changes this by enabling developers build fully managed .NET Framework-based SQL database applications that can run natively on desktops, mobile devices and web servers.

Full article here.

Embeddable database update to add MIPS

Firebird 2.0 article in LinuxDevices.com:

A project maintaining a lightweight, embeddable database is on the cusp of a major version release. Firebird 2.0 will feature a new MIPS architecture port, as well as new features such as derived tables, support for “execute block,” increased table sizes, and better index code.

Check full article here.

open source database conference 2006

The conference will be held again, same time same place. So mark your calendar November 6th-8th opendbcon 2006 in Frankfurt germany.
The call for papers is still going on. So submit your topics ASAP. The plan is to have a wide range of topics that appeals to managers, developers/DBA’s as well as hackers on the various projects. I am also hoping that there will be a large panel discussion.
Read more on Poo-Tee-Weet blog

FIBPlus 6.45 has been released

Devrace developers continue to improve FIBPlus library and make it better compatible with Firebird 2 (in particular now FIBPlus supports charset UTF8 fields for Firebird 2). That’s why the newest FIBPlus version 6.45 has a number of improvements and 16 bug fixes. FIBPlus 6.45 also supports C++ Builder 2006. For more details please check Release Notes. Fully functional FIBPlus trial version is available for download.

FB 2.0 support in Mandriva

Philippe Makowski posted in FB-Support:

Just to inform you and despite it is not yet official, but Mandriva is soon releasing their Corporate Server 4 distro and on the same time, their will be an official Firebird 2.0 package that will be available as additional software for this version.
Mandriva Corporate Server is the sell with support from Mandriva and the Firebird will be supported by IBPhoenix.

So if you need an 5-year Product Maintenance, professional support, Mandriva will be a good choice.

Of course, the package will be also available from Cooker.

dbExpress driver “InterXpress for Firebird” version 1.4.2 released

Martijn Tonies reported:

“InterXpress for Firebird” is our driver that supports Borlands
dbExpress technology! Today is the launch of version 1.4.2
that includes enhancements and fixes.

You can download a copy of it http://www.upscene.com .

Currently supported are Delphi 6, Delphi 7, BDS 2006, Kylix 3
and C++Builder 6.

What’s fixed, new and changed? Check it out here:
List Of Fixes

Buyer nailed down for Borland tools biz

Borland is expected to announce a deal during the next few weeks having picked a buyer from a shortlist of three candidates narrowed from 10, sources told The Register. The deal is believed to be worth between $100m and $150m. More info here.

New IBObjects subrelease supports FB 2.0

The new IBObjects subrelease (4.6Bc) supports all the new features of Firebird 2.0. You can download a trial and get more info at the IBObjects site.

Firebird and Cluster?

OCFS2 (version 2) was integrated into the Linux kernel version 2.6.16. It uses a distributed lock manager which resembles the OpenVMS DLM but is much simpler.

On VAX Clusters - a very specialized kind of network - copies of InterBase running on different nodes in the cluster could access a single database using the distributed lock manager to coordinate access. The open source distributed lock manager may reopen that kind of sharing.

In systems (Apollo was one) that supplied a network file system with reliable file locking, any database could be opened from an InterBase server running on any computer on the network. That server locked the file and caused all further requests for the file to go through it. Any file system that provides reliable file locking and some way to identify the computer that holds
the lock can provide that level of database file / server node independence.

It would be great if someone who have hardware and sufficient knowledge jump-in and help with this...

Tassie newspaper tames open source Firebird

by Rodney Gedda on Computerworld Australia:

Weeks praised Firebird's "super server" architecture, which is a "drop-in replacement" for MySQL and can do whatever MySQL can do "with its eyes closed".

The Examiner now has six different Firebird-based applications that are available to the public to which are connected about 300 companies - like automotive dealers and real estate agents - connect each day.

The applications are developed with the popular PHP scripting language and delivered by the Apache Web server on Linux, exactly like the LAMP (Linux, Apache, and Perl/Python/PHP) stack, but without MySQL. Firebird is also used on FreeBSD Unix and Windows Server.

"Our transaction throughput is pretty light, we might do about 20,000 transactions a day," Weeks said, adding the biggest database is about 16GB. "But maintenance is non-existent - it's a DBA-less database. Backups can be done on the fly, so there's no need to take it offline, and it comes with a simple level of replication built in."

Weeks has also tried developing with PostgreSQL, but it "used all the memory and crashed the server".

He describes PostgreSQL as more of a research database with more features than Firebird, but lacking its level of enterprise robustness.

"News happens 24 hours a day so we need it to go all day, every day," he said. "All development is done on a 166MHz Pentium machine with 64MB of RAM to force you to write good code."

Support is reliable, Weeks said. Firebird's community support is good in that "if you don't get an answer back in 10 minutes, it's a bad day".

Database models

Here is a site with dozens of database models to be downloaded. Thanks Fabio Alves for sending the link to http://www.firebirdnews.org/

Why Can’t Database Tables Index Themselves?

Interesting article can be read here. Thanks for Fabio Alves for sending the link to http://www.firebirdnews.org/

Firebird 2 - New book

Carlos H. Cantu's new book, Firebird 2, was released in Brazil, by Ciencia Moderna publisher. The preface (from Ann Harrison) and the summary can be downloaded here (in portuguese).

IBExpert Personal Edition download is now using new IBExpert Webforms Technology

From Holger Klemt:

Dear IBExpert User,

when you download free IBExpert Personal Edition, you have to use a new url:

HK-Software Download Center
http://www.myibexpert.com/WebForms/?license=hk&id=Download

On this url, you will see the first real life application created with
IBExpert Webforms, a new technology available in one of the next
IBExpert Versions.

[See remaining text…]

With IBExpert Webforms you can create database based Webapplications
in a Delphi/C++ Builder comparable way. Just place your vcl components
in the integrated formdesigner, connect them with your tables or queries
as datasource, using the integrated object inspector, create your events
as stored procedures inside your firebird or interbase database.

There is also a downloadable pdf file that shows a screenshot.

The result is handled by a php script, that is used by the Apache
Webserver on windows, linux or any other Operating System, that supports
apache, php and firebird or interbase.

Your main advantage: you do not need any know how regarding java script,
html, ajax, php, etc. to create your database webapplication.
All operations are done inside your database and you just have to learn
some very simple extensions and rules based on your existing firebird
and interbase knowledge.

More details regarding IBExpert Webforms technology will come as soon
as we can publish a first public alpha version. Subscribers of your
newsletter will be informed as soon as it is available.

IMPORTANT: Bonus for adding your address in HK-Software Download Center:
All users who will enter their complete address on the right while
registering for IBExpert Personal Edition will be able to download
a free pdf Version of the IBExpert Book with about 680 pages.
All entries will be checked manually, so it will be only available
for correct address entries.

If you have no access to the pdf file within 2 working days, please
send an e-mail to register@ibexpert.com with subject
“HK-Software Download Center: missing additional files for xxx@xxx.xxx”
where xxx@xxx.xxx must be replaced with your e-mail address.

The IBExpert Team

Any questions regarding IBExpert Webforms?
please use news://ibexpert.info/hk-software.ibexpert.webforms

The most Expert for InterBase and Firebird — www.ibexpert.com
HK Software - Gerhard Stalling Str 47A - 26135 Oldenburg - Germany
Phone/Fax +49 700 IBEXPERT (42397378) www.h-k.de

Time to vote for Firebird in EvansData!

EvansData opened a new survey related to open source software, and Firebird is listed in two questions:

Which Open Source databases do you use most often?

What database are you using on the platform for which MOST of your applications are targeted?

Let’s vote for Firebird! Click here and vote now!

FastMM 4.68

pierre_le_riche wrote:

"I have just uploaded FastMM 4.68. It contains a fix for a rare crash bug when the FulLDebugMode and RawStackTraces options are both enabled (thanks to Primoz Gabrijelcic for catching it).

There is also an enhancement that improves performance for 4+ CPU systems - the "NeverSleepOnThreadContention" option. (Thanks to Werner Bochtler and Markus Beth for their help with this.)

Currently the GetMem routine is very efficient at avoiding thread contention by switching to an alternate block handler when the requested block size is locked, but the FreeMem routine has no option but to wait if the block type to be freed is currently locked. The FreeMem routine puts the thread to sleep if it cannot free the block immediately, which works very well when the CPU has a lot of other work to do (i.e. the thread to CPU core ratio is high), but is not great when the CPU core would otherwise be idle. Unfortunately the sleep() call has a rather coarse granularity under Win32 and the thread may thus sleep longer than it needs to, wasting precious CPU cycles. This wastage is most apparent with quad CPU systems where the sleep() call has a higher probability of causing the CPU to go idle. In such cases it is better to put the CPU in a "busy waiting" loop so that it can continue the moment the block type is unlocked by another thread. This is what the "NeverSleepOnThreadContention" option does - but don't use it on anything less than a quad core CPU or performance nose dives.

Of course the best solution would be to avoid the thread contention completely. I am toying with the idea of adding the block to be freed to a "blocks to be freed" linked list in lock-free manner (if it cannot be freed immediately). It is then the responsibility of the next GetMem/FreeMem call to process this list and do the actual freeing. There are some issues to iron out, but this could solve this problem once and for all. The change is not a minor one, though, and this probably means FastMM5 is on the cards.

There are also some other feature requests than have been waiting in my inbox for quite a while: Better IDE integration (jump to the line in the source that caused the leak, etc.), better leak management (display a leak tree showing leak dependencies / related leaks instead of a simple list) and on-the-fly switching between debug and performance mode. There are many more, certainly enough to keep me busy for a long time to come!"

Firebird 2.0 Release Candidate 3

We are pleased to invite you to download your preferred binary kit for Firebird 2 Release Candidate 3. You are reminded that, though very close, this is still a field-testing release. Please check any problem areas you encountered in RC 2 and report to the Firebird-devel list without delay if something isn't working as you expect.

Weekly builds of FB ADO.NET Provider

Weekly builds of FB ADO.NET Provider (only) are available on http://netprovider.cincura.net/ .

C# compiler from MS .NET FW 2.0 is used, builds using Mono, etc. will come too.

Comments and request are welcome and can be send to firebird-net-provider@lists.sourceforge.net

Firebird: Free alternative to MS Access, mySQL, SQL Server!

It’s time to vote/digg an firebird article on digg

INM VizionDB uses Firebird

INM VizionDB is the first database management tool designed to meet the needs of skilled programmers, creative individuals and everyone in between by combining leading-edge database technology and support for the creation of engaging interfaces within Macromedia Director.
Built on a solid foundation of renowned, industry-standard Firebird database technology, INM VizionDB supports SQL and additionally offers a Lingo API, familiar to Director developers.
Read more here.

Firebird Enterprise

Paul Beatch wrote on Firebird-General mailing list:
A Firebird user commissioned IBPhoenix to put together an accurate
report showing how capable Firebird was in the Enterprise and we interviwed some
very large users :-) I have asked to see if I can make that report publically available. [So here it is ]

Right click and save as…

http://www.ibphoenix.com/downloads/FirebirdEnterprise.pdf

Creating firebird users in delphi

Here is the google translation of the original article

How do we counteract this perception of Firebird being leaderless?

Paul Beach Response to Forrester’s article about Firebird

As with any Analyst report, the results tend to be utter garbage. No matter how often you explain things to them, if they aren’t going to listen, or understand you are on a loser. Nobody said the project was leaderless, because it isn’t - there is an admin team that look after it, but unlike other open source databases the project isn’t driven by a commercial company. Postgres and Firebird work in the same way by utilising a large community of followers.

At the same time the Analyst has ignored the people he spoke to who use Firebird and come to his own - wrong - conclusions.

[See remaining text…]

The problem you have, is that to make money the report must sell, and therefore must
have “interesting” things to say. Alternatively (or as well) it must identify a
company that is better than all the rest, so hopefully that company will pay to
re-publish the report. Nobody on the Firebird project was likely to pay
Forrester big bucks to reprint

Its interesting - a Firebird user commissioned IBPhoenix to put together an accurate
report showing how capable Firebird was in the Enterprise and we interviwed some
very large users I have asked to see if I can make that report publically available.

In the interim, I can only suggest that people take the time to email Forrester and
suggest that the conclusions are wrong.

Paul

Firebird-Interbase Backup Scheduler 2.0.0

FIBS is a solid, lightweight 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.
Download here

Firebird Generators: Everything you wanted to know

This is a very nice article about Firebird generators: Firebird Generator Guide

Firebird on Softpedia.com

You can write an review or vote for firebird on sofpedia.com

Replication using IBExpert

The open source database server, Firebird, and its commercial partner, Borland InterBase, have long been established as a proven and stable platform for all sorts of database applications. Because of the common ancestry in the form of the InterBase 6 source code, many solutions can be implemented on both platforms without any problems. However Version 2 of the Firebird Server has recently set new standards, introducing many helpful functions that are unfortunately missing in InterBase 7.5.

However a replication facility is not included in either platform. This article illustrates how a replication can be created with the aid of IBExpert and ibeblock.

Download this article here.

Data Generator 2005 for InterBase/Firebird ver. 2.2 released

EMS Software Development company is pleased to announce Data Generator 2005 ver.2.2 - new version of the powerful utility for generating test data for Firebird and InterBase databases.

The opportunity to connect through SSH and HTTP tunnels has been added, new data generation options and speed improvements have been made in the latest program version.

You can download the latest version at: www.sqlmanager.net/products/ibfb/data

Comment on “Firebird Database Server Penetration”

We’re using Firebird in small and big projects for years, both on Linux and Windows servers. One customer has over 80 databases all concurrently used ( by remote shops) and driven by one Firebird server instance. Worked flawlessly for months now. Scalability and performance are exellent.

Posted on Gadgetopia Comments area

Jim Starkey Speaks about Falcon

The July Boston MySQL Meetup’s topic is Falcon, the new storage engine for MySQL. Creator Jim Starkey will speak.

Read more at sheeri.com/archives/88

FirebirdClient v2.0 released

FirebirdClient v2.0 for Microsoft .NET 2.0 and mono is available for
download.

Download information can be found here:

http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=netprovider

IBProvider 3.0.0.1324 [Beta]

This OLEDB provider is being updated to become more compatible with FB 2.0. From the news page:

• Bug fixed
• Firebird compatibility is improved
• “DBMS Version” property now provide real Firebird server version: 0.9.4, 1.0, 1.5.x, 2.x
• “IB Database Creation Date” property added (FB2)

Firebird Mandriva Corporate Server VMware virtual machine

Philippe Makowski wrote on Firebird-General:

Firebird Mandriva Corporate Server VMware virtual machine is ready

It is made with :

* Mandriva Corporate Server 4 beta 3
* Firebird 2 RC2 Classic Server
* Python and PHP drivers
* Flamerobin and IbWebadmin

password for root is mandriva
and the user is : ibphoenix
password ibphoenix


http://makowski.nerim.net/MdkCorpo4-FB2.md5
http://makowski.nerim.net/MdkCorpo4-FB2.zip

the free VMware Player :
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/


Have good testing

New Firebird-Enterprise list

A new list has been created for those wishing to share their
experiences about deploying Firebird databases in big networked enterprises.

See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/firebird-enterprise/

Open Source Impacts Overall Database Software Market

“In the open source world, we are always flattered when changes are attributed to open source,” said MySQL Chief Executive Officer Marten Mickos. “But the enormous price pressure and the desire among customers to get away from licensing fees is self-inflicted and not a result of open source. Open source just happens to be the perfect answer to the cry.” - Read more here.

“The InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine” #4

“The InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine” #4
is available for free download.
Please download it from one of the following locations:

http://www.ibdeveloper.com/issue4/ibdev4.zip
http://www.ibsurgeon.com/download/ibdev4.zip
http://www.ibknowledgebase.com/download/ibdev4.zip

You still can buy full electronic version (instant access to full PDF, including bonus article), USD$9.99/EUR9.99:

http://www.shareit.com/product.html?productid=300073211

Paper version is available too:
http://www.ibdeveloper.com/issue4/ibdev4.zip

DevCo Positive Mood

Several excited blog posts, new hires, and the announcement of the first DevCo Conference add up to the great mood the DevCo startup seems to be in.

The last few days have seen a flurry of blog posts by the new Delphi product manager, Nick Hodges, on his new Borland blog, several posts by Michael Swindell (mostly on JBuilder, but his discussion of how DevCo plans empowering developers one by one certainly applies to Delphi as well), and a very interesting post (as usual) by Allen Bauer. After announcing that Nick joined the company and Jens-Ole' Lauridsen is back, he mentions (with some mystery) a new compiler engineer, which is apparently someone well known by the community.

On BDN there is the announcement of the 2006 conference. Even if date (October/November) and location (Nothern California) the official notice that a conference is in the making and the related call for papers mark another positive sign for DevCo, that for the time of the conference will be a separate company.

Considering all of this, and reading the Borland blogs in particular, anyone can perceive the buzz and the thrill about the new company and its role. Let's hope the new entities come alive ASAP, and all plans will finalize soon: interesting times are coming ahead for "Delphi and company".

New Issue Tracker is OPEN FOR BUSINESS

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce that the new Jira Issue Tracker is open for business. Take your time to work your way around the interface, check existing issues and prepare to post any all-new ones.

Firebird bug trackers are now based on JIRA

Firebird Project: In order to provide additional and much needed functionality to assist in tracking project issues, the existing Sourceforge bug trackers are being replaced with a new tracker based on JIRA. The new tracker will be hosted on a new server and will be using Firebird as its database engine. To facilitate this migration, all of the Sourceforge Trackers have been closed. Once the migration has been completed (a couple of days), a message will be posted providing the URL links for the new tracker site. Dimitrios Chr. Ioannidis and Pavel Cisar should be thanked for their work on the configuration of the new server, the installation and configuration/implementation of the new tracker and migration of the existing data.

Firebird Website Moves to new House

Finally we have moved to our new server in Canada, thanks to the generosity of Broadview Software. More news shortly about our other new server, running a Firebird back-end and our new tracker system. [Ed: this server is way faster than sf.net watch the Alexa’s Site Stats ]

Nick joins DevCo & Delphi Team

Nick Hodges, long time Delphi fellow, is the new Delphi Product Manager for the soon-to-be DevCo. A great opportunity for him, the company, and the entire Delphi community.

Nick discusses his new job (and his great mood) in a post in his blog. He has also an irresistible post in the non-tech group:

" B orland finally went and hired a new Delphi Product Manager. He seems a pretty cool guy. Oh, wait, it's me!"

Is Nick a good choice for the job? Indeed. He is part and will remain part of the community, knowns a lot about the product, has great connections with all of the key players and team members... so he'll certainly be able to serve Delphi need to get back in the hand of more and more developers and students, find its place in software companies and universities alike... and also serve the community helping DevCo to improve the products to better serve its users (and not some "disconnected" analysts).

New job

Yesterday, June 19th, was last day of my USAID TAMP job. It was great experience for me...

My next job will be USAID TARA, and I will start at July 3 ;-)

Go Delphi! Go Firebird!

Back!

I had a surgery last monday, had gall stone removed.
I am recovering fast, so expect some posts these days ;-)

Skype, yeah it too is written in Delphi

posted by Steve Trefethen

"I've seen this mentioned before but since I just posted about Yahoo's Go for TV I figured what the heck, might was well throw Skype into the mix too. Skype is only slightly harder to recognize as being written in Delphi but only because they've decided to package the whole application up into a single 18MB EXE btw, isn't it nice how Delphi gives you that option. If you search for strings in the Skype.exe you'll see lots of Delphi classnames like TInterfacedObject and friends.

Inevitably, the question "Can you point me to any well known large Delphi applications out there?" comes up time and again on the public newsgroups. Well, I think Skype.exe weighing in at 18MB and worth $2.6 Billion answers that question wouldn't you agree?"

Yahoo Go for TV, yeah it's written in Delphi

posted by Steve Trefethen

"Today I was searching for this old project called myHTPC which used to be located here but now redirects you here. So I downloaded and installed Yahoo Go for TV and low and behold rtl70.bpl, vcl70.bpl and vclx70.bpl sitting right in c:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Yahoo! Go for TV. In case you're not familiar with Delphi these files are part of the redistributable portion of the Delphi runtime."

FirebirdClient v2.0 Release Candidate 5 released

FirebirdClient v2.0 Release Candidate 5 is available for download.

Hope this can be the last Release Candidate version before the final
release, of course, if there are no big issues reported in the next weeks.

Download information can be found here:

· Release Candidate 5 ( 2006-06-01 ) ·

[See remaining text…]

( Please review the changelog for details )

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug #1490166.
• Fixed bug #1489770.
• Fixed bug in Domains schema.
• Added the information of the of IscException’s errors to the errors collection.
• Fixed incorrect number of bytes per character in the UTF-8 character set information.
• Fixed FbDataReader.GetEnumerator method to allow the Reader to be closed with CommandBehavior.CloseConnection

Changes:

• Changed GetIPAdressMethod to use IPAddress.Parse with the Data Source when getting an exception with Dns.GetHostEntry.
• Changes on Dispose implementations of FbDataReader, FbCommand and FbConnection classes.
• Added a minor hack to the FbParameter.Size property to try to ha a better detection of Clob parameters
• Added initial support for connection string property synonyms in the DDEX provider.

Some more DevCo info

Allen Bauer had the honor of being interviewed by Huw Collingbourne, the editor of Bitwise Magazine.

FB 2.0 release notes in HTML

The release notes of Firebird 2.0 is now available in HTML format here.

Deconstructing databases with Jim Gray

Jim Gray is one of the nestors of database engineering and currently a MS 'distiguished engineer'. In a Reg interview he speaks about transactions in internet-scale distributed systems and about using graphical processors for parallel processing of streams.
Read more

Morfik defends its IP rights against Google

ZDNet writes: "A couple of weeks ago Google released its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and almost immediately there were rumors of an alliance between Google and Morfik, the Web OS vendor which has a Javascript converter as one of its main products. The reason? GWT bore more than a casual resemblance to Morfik... " By the way, the developer Journal #4 has a write-up about Morfik and its use of Firebird.

Read more

More on DevCo and Firebird

Marco Cantu talks in his blog about what he expects regarding the relationship between DevCo and Firebird. Check the full post here.

Oracle and Open Source

Open source is hot these days, and Oracle knows it. The company is facing challenges from open source competitors by embracing open source technology in its own right - acquiring and developing key companies and products in this area - as well as fighting to show its merits over other open source choices. How does Oracle stack up against PostgreSQL or Firebird? How do Oracle and Linux work together? What's next for Oracle on the open source front?

IB/FB Developer Magazine #4 is available

I guess some of our readers have become a bit tired of waiting and wondering when the new issue would be released. I am really sorry about the long delay, but there have been some serious financial and time issues holding up production.

Read more

Lazarus 0.9.16 released

Vincent writes "The Lazarus team is glad to announce the 0.9.16 release. This release is
based on fpc 2.0.2.

This release can be downloaded from the sourceforge download page.
"

FlameRobin 0.7.2 released

FlameRobin 0.7.2 has been released. Windows (setup & zip), Linux (gtk1 &. gtk2), Mac OS X and source packages are available for download.
Read more

New technology licenses from IBExpert

From Holger Klemt:

"A lot of customers asked us regarding a cheaper possibility to use our ibeblock technology for their own software. The IBExpert VAR License gives a distribution license for all modules including the IBExpert IDE. Some smaller software companies just asked for a way to integrate our technology for a cheaper price."
Read more

Devrace aquires Metadataforge

Devrace have recently acquired Metadataforge company (SQLHammer project) and will immediately start selling the product. Read details in the press-release
Read more

Download Sizes: Firebird vs Sqlserver

[ED:blog of the day is Ben Ward’s post about firebird vs sqlserver download sizes/requirements]

Originally, my Desktop Search application (‘Oak’) was to use a Microsoft SQL Server Express database backend. Full of glorious developer friendly features (like .NET integration) it is a powerhouse of a database.

[See remaining text…]

However, whilst building some initial test applications I made the horrifying discovery that rather than embed itself in my application, as I’d mistakenly thought it would, SQL Server Express insists on being run as Windows service. Since it’s not distributed as a key part of Windows that would have meant having to download about 40MB of SQL server, alongside the 20MB .NET 2.0 redistributable, alongside my application (lets say that’ll be somewhere around 6 meg).

This download size prompted me to switch from SQL Server to Firebird – which adds only 2MB to the application and runs embedded, not as a standalone service.

eWeek: "Save Me from Cleverness" - One more reason I love Delphi

Peter Coffee's "Save Me from Cleverness" (May 15, 2006) is another
great example of why I love Delphi.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1959854,00.asp

Although the article does not specifically mention Delphi, it does
speak volumes regarding the tersness of the C family of languages
and the impact of cleverness in programming.

IDC confirms Firebird's leading position !!

Oracle has last year's report as well, with even more detail. It shows Borland as a quickly growing database company, riding the FB/IB success wave. It's database sales are closely tracking MySQL, with 2004 sales already at the $9 million mark. Read more link has the PDF with full details.

Read more

Details of IDC's market estimates

Oracle is publishing a summary of IDC's market report, with sales estimates for the main proprietary players for the last 3 years. The Read More link has a PDF with that summary.

Read more

Should Oracle fear open source?

Referring to Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat Software, Graham said: "Open source in general starts small but then it ends up having a big impact. Oracle knows this. They happened to acquire an open source vendor themselves, because thy want to get on that train." She added: "We expect [open source database software sellers] to gain market share, and probably pretty quickly."
Read more

PostgreSQL fix could break applications

PostgreSQL users have been put in a potentially sticky situation by a serious security flaw made public this week. The flaw allows for SQL injection attacks, and affects all versions of PostgreSQL, aside from fixed versions released this week. However, the fix, PostgreSQL developers admit, will break many users' applications.
Read more

Suggesting DevCo Name

DevCo is looking for a name... and suggestions. Name debate is hot!

Michael Swindell has officially asked for suggestions for the new name (but not only that) in a blog post. Meanwhile, the non-tech group has a long thread (106 messages at this moment) spawned by Marco Cantu's blog post, with very few good suggestions and tons of nonsense ones. Cure ideas: "But we wrote Delphi Dev Co", "The Developers Company", "BIMB Is Not Borland", "Be Rad, Inc."... and many more.

Remember, the web site must be available, should not be a trademark, and should possibly start with "B".

Why we all sell code with bugs - firebird mentioned

[Quoting from this article where firebird is mentioned http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1781895,00.html ]

For instance, our product, Vault, stores all data using Microsoft SQL Server. Some people don’t like this. We’ve been asked to port the back end to Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Firebird. This issue is in our bug database as item 6740.

Read complete story

Temporary tables

From Dmitry Yemanov:
Implementation of the SQL-2003 compliant global temporary tables has been committed into the HEAD branch. This feature will be released in the next (post-v2.0) Firebird version. Design and implementation of the local temporary tables (both “defined” and “declared”, see the SQL specification for details) are being investigated, but there are no timeframes defined for that.

Another Opportunity to Pump Up Delphi on JoelOnSoftware

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.345746.28

Once again, feel free to jump in and give your $0.02.

Previous discussions are here:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.342621.17

How many ISV here use Delphi ?
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.342621.85
and
Delphi for easy cross platform development
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.342623.19

SAS’s Goodnight won’t say goodbye yet

“…I think, to some extent, that Oracle is getting to that perch in the database business. Yet there is a lot of movement in the database business with open source software. We use one called Firebird. They should do something about it.

We had an experience when we were thinking about going public and our consultants said that we needed to get off SAS for our internal ERP work because it is just not a recognised brand and they suggested Oracle. It was Ernst and Young and we spent three or four years and $10m and it was just outrageous. And in the release (of Oracle) that we were working on there were over 10,000 bugs. That’s horrible.“

Read complete article here.

SQLServer 2005 at 6 Months

"MS Sausage" has been out for six months. ENT News writes: "Six months after its launch, SQL Server 2005 remains free of showstopper bugs or known security issues. Still after five years between database releases, Microsoft hasn’t shown evidence yet that there’s huge pent-up demand for SQL Server." One poster complains that, yes, there are no showstopper bugs, but plenty of regular bugs. Time to switch?

Added: One of the comments on the article by Bobby Jasper from Baltimore, MD says: "You could have a look at the open source RDBMS Firebird (www.firebirdsql.org). These folks have built up a good reputation on releasing rock solid stuff. It is probably the most used open source databse on the windows platform."

Read more

Firebird in China

From the Site of the day department here is the firebird dedicated site in china www.firebird.net.cn/
[Ed : you will need the babel fish maybe ]

Adarvo and Firebird

From IBPhoenix - Adarvo Ltd, Switzerland (www.adarvo.net) run a collaboration server that is based on a Firebird database. Current (May 2006) size of the database is about 49GB and there are more than 2000 customers currently using the service at this site.

First two chapters of "Using Firebird" available

Paul Vinkenoog writes: "I think I’ve done most of the necessary update/correction/extension work, but I may have overlooked some things, and possibly introduced some fresh errors too. But I’ve gone through so many cycles of reading, updating and re-reading by now that I can’t look at it with a fresh eye anymore. High time somebody else had a look."

Read more

Who gives, who takes?

Information Week writes: "This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they're getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development."

Read more

Free vs. gratis databases

Analyst firm Hydrasight research director John Brand says: "I think we'll also see a fairly aggressive push from vendors in trying to influence, if not control, the open source database development market. It's such a huge market that could potentially influence so many other market segments." That said, Brand believes the days of databases themselves being valuable is "somewhat over", because the needs of users have evolved and the race is now on to control the business process layers of software, not just data structure and storage.

Read more

Google licensing Morfik's JST?

Morfik developed the breakthrough web app RAD tool, WebOS. WebOS generates AJAX web applications in an environment that resembles Delphi C/S development. It uses Firebird as its DB server. One important part of its technology is "JST", a javascript compiler. Google has released a similar technology, perhaps licensed from Morfik.

Read more

Full-Text Search: Fast, Damn Fast and DotLucene

DotLucene is an open-source search engine library for .NET. There is now set up a demo site (damnfastdotlucene.org) that tests DotLucene performance on quite a big set of documents
[ED:Lucene.net index can be stored in firebird database]

FlameRobin 0.7.1 released

Windows (setup & zip), Linux (gtk1 &. gtk2), Mac OS X and source packages are available for download. Read more here, changelog included

Firebird snapshot builds

From Dmitry Yemanov:

For those who's not yet aware - Linux x86 snapshot builds are available at http://www.dqteam.com/fb2/. They include a few recent builds of the Firebird 2.0 release candidate as well as builds from the HEAD branch (where new development happens). Win32 snapshot builds (Firebird 2.0 only) are still here. Snapshots are intended for Firebird developers and experienced beta testers. These builds are untested and provided with no guarantees.

Firebird 2.0 Release Candidate 2 for Win32 is Released

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce the second release
candidate of Firebird 2.0, for final testing. The binary kits for Win32
have been uploaded and should be available soon.

FirebirdClient v2.0 Release Candidate 4

FirebirdClient v2.0 Release Candidate 4 is available for download.

Download information can be found here:

http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=netprovider

· Release Candidate 4 ( 2006-05-15 ) ·

( Please review the changelog for details )

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed bug in Domains schema.

Changes:

- Changed info calls reponse length handling to handle responses
with a small size than the requested one.

- Changed validations on FbCommand.CommandText property.

FlameRobin 0.7.0 Released!

0.7.0 (win32 setup) is out.
The other kits will be done soon.

Firebird 2.0 Release Candidate 2 is Released (Linux Builds Only Currently)

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce the second release
candidate of Firebird 2.0, for final testing. The Source tarball
and the binary kits for Linux have been uploaded and should be available
soon. There will be a delay with the Windows kits so please be patient.

http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=fb2_rc2

Regards.
Firebird Project

FIBPlus V6.4.1 with Delphi 2006 support

FIBPlus V6.4.1 is available for download. This new version includes Delphi 2006 support and several bug-fixes for V6.4. Please read the release notes for more details.

EMS software for Interbase or Firebird with a 15% discount

EMS announce a special May offer, this offer allows you to purchase any EMS software for Interbase or Firebird with a 15% discount. The offer is valid for only 15 days.

Why Microsoft will fail

Toorg's Tales mentions Firebird.

Firebird: Improved remote protocol

Dmitry Yemanov reports:

The remote protocol has been slightly improved to perform better in slow networks. In order to achieve this, more advanced packets batching is now performed, also there are some buffer transmission optimizations. In a real world test scenario, these changes showed about 50% less API roundtrips, thus causing about 40% less TCP roundtrips. Hopefully, this is an improvement some our users could benefit from (mostly it should affect over-the-internet database access).

This work has been committed into the HEAD branch to be included into the next Firebird version. Further protocol improvements are also planned.

Borland Unveils New Organizational Structure

More, "interesting" news from Borland today: "Borland Unveils New Organizational Structure"

And, Nick Hodges have few words to say:

" What I do know is that we Delphi people need to start realizing that this isn't something for us to be concerned about anymore. Borland and DevCo are de facto separate entities -- soon to be de jure separate. It's been a long time, and it will likely take some getting used to, but Borland's fate really isn't ours anymore. While I'm sure we all wish Borland well, DevCo is on a separate path, doing separate things, with a different market and a separate business model to follow. Borland laying off peole doesn't really seem to affect DevCo. It appears as though DevCo is pressing forward."

Morfik on ZDNet

ZDNet blog brings article about Morfik WebOS, wich uses Firebird 2.0 as its official database. WebOS is the the next big thing in web app development, raising the level of abstraction above the level that PHP and AJAX have achieved. With WebOS you can write very advanced web applications, very easy, very fast and very robust. No wonder it picks FB as its default database choice. Read more

David Intersimone on Borland spin-out "DevCo"

The leadership team of DevCo includes: Nigel Brown, Michael Swindell, Steve Todd, Alan Bauer, Ben Netick, and David Intersimone. They have 3-year roadmaps for Delphi, JBuilder, and Interbase. The size of DevCo will be ~250-300 at the start, i.e. about 20% of Borland's workforce. "Develop" has $100 mln in sales, about 30% of the total. Sounds like "DevCo" will be quite profitable from the start.

Read more

Common Firebird Errors and Firebird .NET Provider Exceptions

Common Firebird Errors and Firebird .NET Provider Exceptions

Jim outlines Falcon

Jim outlined Falcon at the MySQL user conference. All the Firebird concepts are in place: single file paged storage, indexes hold no data, self-tuning, multi-versioning, careful write, etc. The main design difference with Firebird is that record versions are kept in memory, with overflow to disk, i.e. the 'sweeper' thread is replaced by a 'writer' thread. Falcon is due to appear in Q3, which makes it a 90-day project .. just like Vulcan.

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The Open Source Venture Capital Universe

Sys-Con discusses how VC investments in Open Source have worked and are working. Says one VC: "What I find most compelling in the OSS business models is the recent shift from the support- and services-based revenue models to the commercial open source. In the commercial open source model, about 80 percent of the product functionality is released as OSS, which guarantees a great product for most customers. The remaining 20 percent of functionality, which is useful to only large customers, is released as a low cost commercial product." Like Fyracle, you mean?

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LinuxDevices on Firebird

Although most Firebird users deploy on Windows, the Linux community is increasingly discovering the benefits of this database system: easy, compact, powerful. LinuxDevices reports.

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Mickos critical of 'crippled' closed-source databases

MySQL CEO Mickos told conference delegates: "There's no freedom in crippleware... I learned when I moved to the US there's no such thing as a free lunch. If a company that gives you a free version is closed source, they gain nothing unless you upgrade to the expensive version." At the same time MySQL are partnering with Microsoft, IBM's DB2 division and Oracle. Who's paying for that lunch?

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Jim Starkey: Introducing Falcon (Storage Engine for MySQL)

Last session of the MySQL UC is Jim Starkey giving an introduction to the new Falcon storage engine. Jim is an icon in the database field, was the creator of MVCC and the BLOB data type. There’s a can of Falcon beer for anyone who asks a good question.

Read the Falcon intro

[Ed :When i read the word Falcon i always associate it with Millennium Falcon, Yes Jim is fighting a good cause against evil empire ]

Firebird used at siemens.com

Firebird seems to be used in embedded area at siemens (amd mips processors) .
You can follow the mips porting thread on sf.net

falcon will rock on fulltext searches (mysql)

via Jeremy's blog

The good news is that the recently announced falcon storage engine should have a FULLTEXT engine that rocks. After explaining the situation a bit more, we decided that in the mean time a 64-bit MySQL with a ton of RAM is probably the only viable solution.

Xul for thought: Strange Blog behaviour and Firebird Embedded Database on Linux

[ED:Don't know what was the solution to his problems , at least firebird embedded is used by someone ;)]

Read more at xullicious.blogspot.com...

Nigel Brown talks about IDEs future

Nigel Brown, "DevCo" general manager discusses some of the plans for Delphi and the JBuilder. Very interesting.

You can find the full interview on The Register. You can also find comments from Allen Bauer, Nick Hodges (hey, Nick, you forgot the title!), and people in the newsgroups (using Marco Cantu's AJAX frontend).

What's my take? I find it very interesting and it sheds a new light on the way DevCo could sell Delphi. They want to take again the lead over Microsoft ("Our goal is to get back to that scenario where we are leading"), invest more moeny in the IDE tools, rehire "engineers and architects who were at the forefront of developing languages", mentions an "installed base of three million developers", wants to start "making money from support and added services".

New SQL functions

Dmitry Yemanov writes:

Implementation of a new aggregate function LIST has been committed into the HEAD branch. It's one of the remaining changes that weren't ported from the Yaffil codebase yet. There are other built-in functions to port, they will be discussed in firebird-devel later this week.

Syntax: LIST ( [DISTINCT] value [ , delimiter ] )

Semantics is similar to the LIST function in Sybase SQL Anywhere and GROUP_CONCAT function in MySQL, with the exception of the ORDER BY clause which is not supported yet.

Also, Adriano dos Santos Fernandes has implemented the new REPLACE function (also about to be committed into HEAD). It can be considered a simplified version of the standard MERGE statement, which allows conditional INSERT or UPDATE operation based on a primary key match.

Syntax: REPLACE INTO table [ ( column_list ) ] VALUES ( value_list )
[ RETURNING column_list [ INTO variable_list ] ]
The SQL99-compliant MERGE statement is also planned for implementation in the future.

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More info about Falcon

Here you can find more information about the new MySQL engine. Falcon is the new “toy” from Jim Starkey

Firebird Foundation blog

FF just started its own blog. You can check the first posts here.

if you can’t connect to localhost with firebird2 rc1

Problem is the installer for firebird 2.0 rc1 currently changes permissions on /etc/services file to 600 and permisions need to be 644.

This has been posted on Firebird Devel List and is patched.
I will repost it here so others have less problems finding it.

REPOST FROM Firebird Devel List

[See remaining text…]

The FB-2-beta2 still changes the access rights to
/etc/services.

I finally figured out why my java (after
fb-installation) failed to work with a network. This
failure had nothing to with fb, even a simple
InetAddress.getByName(”localhost”);
failed.

The reason is, that the install process sets the access
rights to /etc/services from 0644 to 0600!

This prevented Java to access the network (except for
user root).

Using Firebird with SME Server 7.O (an modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux)

Here are the instructions to run firebird on SME Server

Firebird bigger than MySQL on Windows

Marten Mikos says that 40% of MySQL is on Windows. Taking an installed base of 5 mln, this means about 2 mln on Windows. Firebird is 70..80% on Windows, so >2 mln. Marten further wants to be partners with Microsoft. "Hi Bill, I've just hired Firebird's Jim Starkey to write Falcon and compete with SQLServer head-on. Want to be friends?"

Read more here

Birds, Dolphins and now… Falcons (isn’t Falcon a bird?)

“At the MySQL’s fourth annual users conference, Jim Starkey, a database trailblazer with InterBase and currently a MySQL senior software architect, will discuss MySQL’s developing storage engine, code-named Falcon, said Zack Urlocker, executive vice president of marketing Cupertino, Calif.-based MySQL. The conference kicks off Monday in Santa Clara, Calif.” - Read more here.

Linux SS new install package - mainly for slackware

Alex Peshkov writes:

I’ve done some changes regarding SS installation. This mainly deals with
Slackware support, but some changes concerning another things are also
done. Who interested, may try Snapshot builds from
http://www.insi.yaroslavl.ru/fb/.

Creating Firebird database programatically in delphi

Today my colleague asked me the question, “How to create FB database programatically from Delphi?”. Well, the solution is very easy, just use the following code:

[See remaining text…]

IBDatabase1.DatabaseName := ChangeFileExt(Application.ExeName, '.fdb');
IBDatabase1.Params.Add('USER ''SYSDBA''');
IBDatabase1.Params.Add('PASSWORD ''masterkey''');
IBDatabase1.Params.Add('PAGE_SIZE 4096');
IBDatabase1.Params.Add('DEFAULT CHARACTER SET WIN1250');
IBDatabase1.CreateDatabase;

Jiří Činčura - http://blog.vyvojar.cz/jirka/