The owners of the InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine iBase.ru and IBPhoenix today agreed to collaborate in producing future issues of the magazine. Under the agreement, free copies of the magazine will be distributed to IBPhoenix Support and Subscription customers automatically in advance of publication.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
New sessions in IBExpertLive! Free Firebird training and Conference videos online!
What is IBExpertLive?
HK-Software has implemented a streaming system based on the Firebird database
server, which publishes pictures and audio, as needed to view the presentations from
the 2004, 2005 and 2006 Firebird Conferences. There are also IBExpert
tutorial videos enabling you to learn more about working with Firebird and
InterBase with IBExpert. There is currently about 55GB of video data available,
with around 200 hours of firebird-related presentations from last two Firebird
Conferences and other events.
![[Image]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s1kEhacgxx1pfH9xbWCyejrgLnj8h1Um7jShpf0triz3h7KDkXQH5_d76bVJOqHEfrwFMRIIF61ghuA6UnbUjVylMVyHMCQ0YNtuxj=s0-d)
To use IBExpertLive, you need a firebird connection via Internet using port 13050 to our
server on IP 80.237.154.78. If it does not work, please check your firewall settings.
The IBExpertLive Player is freeware and included in IBExpert Setup or can be downloaded
seperatly here
www.ibexpert.com/IBExpertLive/setup_IBExpertLive.exe
The sessions are also free, but the player requires a free email registration
An overview of all sessions can be found below (partly in german language).
110 FBCON2006 B01-Paul Ruizendaal - Solution Stacks Built on Firebird and PHP - Another Flame in the Lamp?
111 FBCON2006 C01-Milan Babuskov - Developing Cross Platform Aplications with Firebird and wxWidgets
112 FBCON2006 B02-Martijn Tonies - The Firebird System Tables
113 FBCON2006 C02-Mauritio Longo - Supporting Complex On Line Systems with Satellite Databases
114 FBCON2006 B03-Thomas Steinmaurer - Owner Migration the Easy Way
115 FBCON2006 C03-Andrew Morgan - Towards a Universal UDF Testing Framework
116 FBCON2006 B04-Björn Reimer/Dirk Baumeister - Firebird Clients and System Tables
117 FBCON2006 C04-Fikret Hasovic - Cross - Platform Development Using Lazarus
118 FBCON2006 A05-FirebirdFoundation - Opening and Welcome(only just audio)
119 FBCON2006 A06-PaulReeves - Building Firebird on Windows and Linux
120 FBCON2006 B06-DmitrySibiryakov - Replication with IBReplicator
121 FBCON2006 C06-CarlosCantu - New Shutdown Modes and Backups in Firebird 2.0
122 FBCON2006 A07-DmitryYemanov - Cost-based Optimization and Statistics
123 FBCON2006 B07-ErickSasse - N-Tier applications with Firebird and RemObjects DataAbstract
124 FBCON2006 C07-HolgerKlemt - Creating modern database webaplications using Firebird, php and AJAX
125 FBCON2006 A08-IvanPrenosil - Data Types in Practice/Optimizing Counts(Dual Topics)
126 FBCON2006 B08-GaryFranklin/BillOliver - Real World Applications Using Firebird
127 FBCON2006 C08-AlexSkvirski - Firebird Connectivity Tools or is there any Performance loss out there?
128 FBCON2006 A09-RomanRokytskyy - External routines:interface, usage and possibilities
129 FBCON2006 B09-MauricioLongo - Applications with Morfik WebOS and Firebird
130 FBCON2006 C09-DmitriKouzmenko - Optimizing Server Performance
131 FBCON2006 A10-HolgerKlemt - Creating Transaction Logs in Interbase
132 FBCON2006 B10-MilanBabuskov - Managing Metadata Chaanges
133 FBCON2006 C10-GaryFranklin/BillOliver - Delivering and using the Vulcan embeddet Server as Part of SAS
134 FBCON2006 D11-VladislavHorsun - New SQL Features in coming Versions of Firebird
135 FBCON2006 B12-RomanRokytskyy - Jaybird new release new features
136 FBCON2006 C12-DmitriKouzmenko - Database Health and Corruption
150 FBCON2005 Andrew Morgan - Embedding and using sophisticated mathematics in Firebird (FBC2005)
151 FBCON2005 Ann Harrison - Detecting correcting and preventing database corruption (FBC2005)
152 FBCON2005 Evgeney Putilin - Firebird and Java Stored Procedures (FBC2005)
153 FBCON2005 Nando Dessena - Deploying Firebird transparently on Windows (FBC2005)
154 FBCON2005 Paul Reeves - From Basic to Advanced ISQL scripting (FBC2005)
155 FBCON2005 Fikret Hasovic - Open source Delphi (FBC2005)
156 FBCON2005 Luiz Paulo de Oliveira Santos - Firebird API in Delphi Lazarus and Free Pascal (FBC2005)
157 FBCON2005 Jason Wharton - IB Objects for Newbies (FBC2005)
158 FBCON2005 Luiz Paulo de Oliveira Santos - Techniques for migrating from MySQL to Firebird (FBC2005)
159 FBCON2005 Stefan Heymann - What Developers Should Know about Character Sets and Unicode etc (FBC2005)
160 FBCON2005 Lucas Franzen - STORED PROCEDURES (FBC2005)
161 FBCON2005 Claus Heeg - Migration and integration of other databases into Firebird using Cold Fusion
162 FBCON2005 Holger Klemt - Setting Up a bidirectional Replication based on EXECUTE STATEMENT Commands
163 FBCON2005 Paul Ruizendaal - Solution Stacks Built on Firebird and PHP - Another Flame in the LAMP
164 FBCON2005 Pavel Cisar - Firebird Quality Assurance (FBC2005)
165 FBCON2005 Dmitri Kouzmenko - Firebird Performance Optimization for Different Applications (FBC2005)
166 FBCON2005 Thomas Steinmaurer - Audit Trails Transaction Log Redo with the IB LogManager product family
167 FBCON2005 Milan Babuskov - The power of Firebird events (FBC2005)
168 FBCON2005 Martijn Tonies - The Firebird system tables (FBC2005)
169 FBCON2005 Kim Madsen - SOA using kbmMW (FBC2005)
170 FBCON2005 Daniel Magin - Developing DataBase ASP.net Application with Delphi 2006 (FBC2005)
171 FBCON2005 Mauricio Longo - Dynamic Databases - A Conceptual Overview (FBC2005)
172 FBCON2005 Carlos Cantu - PSQL in Action (FBC2005)
173 FBCON2005 Jim Starkey - Configuring Firebird and Vulcan (FBC2005)
174 FBCON2005 Jim Starkey - Vulcan status features and goals (FBC2005)
175 FBCON2005 Arno Brinkman - Understanding the Optimizer I (FBC2005)
176 FBCON2005 Paul Beach Dmitry Yemanov - Firebird future development (FBC2005)
177 FBCON2005 Mauricio Longo - FireQ - Firebird Based Messaging Infrastructure (FBC2005)
178 FBCON2005 Roman Rokytskyy - JayBird - JCA/JDBC driver for Firebird (FBC2005)
179 FBCON2005 Roman Rokytskyy - JayBird - JCA/JDBC driver for Firebird (FBC2005)
180 FBCON2005 Lester Caine - Firebird on PHP Integrate or Abstract (FBC2005)
181 FBCON2005 Jeanot Bijpost - An introduction to Cathedron (FBC2005)
182 FBCON2005 Andrew Morgan - Creating and managing recursive structures (FBC2005)
183 FBCON2005 Holger Klemt - Server Performance - How to make your application run faster (FBC2005)
184 FBCON2005 Ann Harrison - First steps in performance tuning (FBC2005)
185 FBCON2005 Milan Babuskov - FlameRobin - administration tool for Firebird DBMS (FBC2005)
186 FBCON2005 Claus Heeg - Building ERP web applications based on Firebird and cold Fusion (FBC2005)
187 FBCON2005 Serg Vostrikov - Getting Started with FIBPlus (FBC2005)
188 FBCON2005 Arno Brinkman Dmitry Yemanov - Under the hood Data access paths (FBC2005)
189 FBCON2005 Pavel Cisar - Making your own Firebird PowerTools with Python (FBC2005)
190 FBCON2005 Stefan Heymann - Using Firebird for Quality Management Software (FBC2005)
191 FBCON2005 Serg Vostrikov - Special FIBPlus features network traffic optimization and FIBPlus
Repository
192 FBCON2005 Fikret Hasovic - Firebird in n-tier setup with Delphi and kbmMW (FBC2005)
193 FBCON2005 Jeanot Bijpost - From Model Driven Development to Model Driven Architectures (FBC2005)
194 FBCON2005 Alex Peshkov - New security features in Firebird 2.0 (FBC2005)
196 FBCON2005 Arno Brinkman - Understanding the Optimizer II (FBC2005)
200 FBCON2004 Frank Ingermann - The Sparkey of the year Event (FBC2004)
201 FBCON2004 Ann Harrison - QLI (FBC2004)
202 FBCON2004 Helen Borrie - Creating a shop (the new Firebird Example Database) (FBC2004)
203 FBCON2004 Helen Borrie - Stocking the Shelves and Browsing the store (FBC2004)
204 FBCON2004 Arno Brinkmann - Understanding the Optimizer in Firebird (FBC2004)
205 FBCON2004 Arno Brinkmann - The Optimizer in SQL Examples (FBC2004)
206 FBCON2004 Pavel Cisar - Wrestling Firebird (FBC2004)
207 FBCON2004 Pavel Cisar - Firebird QA (FBC2004)
208 FBCON2004 Lucas Franzen - STORED PROCEDURES I (FBC2004)
209 FBCON2004 Lucas Franzen - STORED PROCEDURES II (FBC2004)
210 FBCON2004 Ann Harrison - Lock print (FBC2004)
211 FBCON2004 Frank Ingermann - Client Performance (FBC2004)
212 FBCON2004 Frank Ingermann - FBFreeDB (FBC2004)
213 FBCON2004 Holger Klemt - The Power of “Execute Statement” (FBC2004)
214 FBCON2004 Holger Klemt - corrupt Databases, examples and Solutions (FBC2004)
215 FBCON2004 Holger Klemt - Firebird performance Workshop (FBC2004)
216 FBCON2004 Manuel Morbitzer - PHP and Firebird (FBC2004)
217 FBCON2004 Manuel Morbitzer - Firebird and Visual Studio .NET (FBC2004)
218 FBCON2004 Paul Reeves - Building Firebird Installation Kits for Win32 (FBC2004)
219 FBCON2004 Paul Reeves - Firebird System Tables (FBC2004)
220 FBCON2004 Nicolay Samofatov - External tables (FBC2004)
221 FBCON2004 Nicolay Samofatov - new backup technology (FBC2004)
222 FBCON2004 Jim Starkey - Vulcan Architecture (FBC2004)
223 FBCON2004 Jim Starkey - Vulcan Design Goals (FBC2004)
224 FBCON2004 Thomas Steinmaurer - Serverseitige Programmier-Techniken (FBC2004)
225 FBCON2004 Thomas Steinmaurer - Neuerungen in Firebird 1.5 (FBC2004)
226 FBCON2004 Martijn Tonies - An Introduction to Firebird for database developers (FBC2004)
227 FBCON2004 Martijn Tonies - The Firebird PSQL language (FBC2004)
228 FBCON2004 Jason Wharton - IBO and Firebird / IBO Advanced (FBC2004)
229 FBCON2004 Hilmar Brodner - AvERP I Grundlagen und Administration (FBC2004)
230 FBCON2004 Hilmar Brodner - AvERP II Programmierung (FBC2004)
231 FBCON2004 Paul Ruizendaal - Moving applications from Oracle to Firebird (FBC2004)
232 FBCON2004 Artur Anjos - Using Firebird over the Internet (FBC2004)
233 FBCON2004 Bastian Morbitzer - PHPtree - Firebird basierende PHP Anwendung für Dokumentation und
Hilfssystem (FBC2004)
234 FBCON2004 Bastian Morbitzer - The Future of a global Firebird Online Documentation System (FBC2004)
235 FBCON2004 Lester Caine - PHP - Life after Builder6 (FBC2004)
236 FBCON2004 Marc o Dunehue - Firebird and Java I (FBC2004)
237 FBCON2004 Marc o Donehue - Firebird and Java II (FBC2004)
238 FBCON2004 Bernd UA - Delphi 8 and Firebird .NET Provider (FBC2004)
101 HK Presentation: Improving performance with IBExpert (Budapest 02/2005)
102 HK Presentation: A review of IBExpert’s range of functions (Budapest 02/2005)
German only:
001. HK German Tutorial: Grundlagen SQL und Einrichtung IBExpert Demodatenbank
002. HK German Tutorial: Einfache Firebird SQL Befehle
003. HK German Tutorial: Tabellen mit SQL verknüpfen
004. HK German Tutorial: Where Bedingungen
005. HK German Tutorial: Erstellen einer eigenen Datenbank
006. HK German Tutorial: Tabellen erstellen
007. HK German Tutorial: Tabellen mit Fremdschlüssel erstellen
008. HK German Tutorial: Benutzer erstellen und Rechte vergeben
009. HK German Tutorial: Datenbank Parameter und Hintergrundwissen
010. HK German Tutorial: Tabellen abfragen, Indizes erstellen und SQL Performance vergleichen
011. HK German Tutorial: Auswirkungen langer Char Felder
012. HK German Tutorial: UDF benutzerdefinierte Funktionen einbinden
013. HK German Tutorial: IBExpert Demo Database Collection
014. HK German Tutorial: Datenbankdesigner Entity Relationship Modeling
016. HK German Tutorial: Erstellen eines triggerbasierenden Transaktionslogs
017. HK German Tutorial: Logging in IBExpert und Trigger in der Employee Datenbank
018. HK German Tutorial: Sprachelemente für Stored Procedures
019. HK German Tutorial: Rekursionen in Prozeduren und erste eigene Prozeduren
020. HK German Tutorial: Prozeduren entwickeln und optimieren
021. HK German Tutorial: Trigger entwickeln für Transaktionsprotokolle
022. HK German Tutorial: Views und Updatable Views
023. HK German Tutorial: Views für mehrere Tabellen
024. HK German Tutorial: Wie funktioniert Firebird intern? I
025. HK German Tutorial: Wie funktioniert Firebird intern? II
026. HK German Tutorial: Wie funktioniert Firebird intern? III
027. HK German Tutorial: Wie funktioniert Firebird intern? IV
028. HK German Tutorial: FBConnections, gfix, Cache und sonstige Parameter festlegen
029. HK German Tutorial: IBETransactionMonitor, Server Properties, Backup Restore, Logging,
Quellcodemanagement
030. HK German Tutorial: IBExpertSQLMonitor, Firebird ODBC und MS Access, Export, IBEBlock ODBC
031. HK German Tutorial: IBExpert Spezialfunktionen, Plananalyzer, Selektivität,Kommandozeilenprogramme,
External Files
032. HK German Tutorial: Installation und Vergleich FB15-FB20, Performanceanalyse, IBExpert Doku, Extract
Metadaten, Datenbanken reparieren
033. HK German Tutorial: Alias.conf, firebird.conf, Temp Pfad und Dateien
034. HK German Tutorial: firebird.log, Freeadhocudf
035. HK German Tutorial: Demodatabase Transaktionslog, rfunc UDF, Replikation
036. HK German Tutorial: Internet Firebirdverbindung mit Zebedee
037. HK German Tutorial: Testdaten generieren, Performancemessung, Indizes, Plan, Selektivität,
038. HK German Tutorial: Set Statistics, Indexoptimierung, order by, Fremschlüsselindizes
039. HK German Tutorial: Datenbankstatistik, Backup Restore Optimierung,
040. HK German Tutorial: Trigger statt FK, MGA, Versionierung
041. HK German Tutorial: SQL,in,exists,updateable views,Performance, firebird.conf Konfiguration, lange
Varchar,Cache
042. HK German Tutorial: external files,csv export,
043. HK German Tutorial: IBExpert Export
044. HK German Tutorial: CSV Import Insertex, Tabelle in andere Datenbank kopieren,
045. HK German Tutorial: IBExpert.usr Menüs einschränken, Sprachanpassung
046. HK German Tutorial: mit ibeblock Metadatenextract per Kommandozeile automatisieren und mit DLL in
eigene Programme integrieren
047. HK German Tutorial: Metadatenextract mit Daten, Blobunterstützung in Scripts
048. HK German Tutorial: ibeblock ODBC Zugriff, MS Access Datenbanken einbinden,Daten von ODBC nach
Firebird kopieren
049. HK German Tutorial: ibeblock Datenbanken verknüpfen
050. HK German Tutorial: Dateien importieren, Bilder importieren per Script
051. HK German Tutorial: Dateien per Script updaten
052. HK German Tutorial: Verbindungen über das Internet mit Zebedee verschlüsseln und komprimieren, Dyndns
mit no-ip.com nutzen
053. HK German Tutorial: Performance Internetbetrieb von Datenbankservern, Pingzeit,Route
054. HK German Tutorial: HK Services, Transaction Monitor
055. HK German Tutorial: Delphi BDE Applikationen auf IBObjects umstellen mit GReplace
056. HK German Tutorial: Datenbanken nachträglich Character Set und Dialekt konvertieren
057. HK German Tutorial: Extrahieren von Daten und ausführen per DLL
058. HK German Tutorial: Applikation Optimieren durch Einsatz spezieller IBO Komponenten, IB_DSQL,
IB_CURSOR
059. HK German Tutorial: Performancevergleich IBO Query, IBO Cursor, BDE Query etc.
060. HK German Tutorial: Performanceprobleme durch Autobackground Commit Close Open vermeiden, Master
Detail
061. HK German Tutorial: Lazarus: Open Source Delphi für Windows und Linux, Zeos, AvERP Open Source
Warenwirtschaft, Datenmodellierung, Laufzeitformular
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Oracle Plugs 51 Security Flaws
Oracle on Tuesday released fixes for 51 vulnerabilities that affect its software products. The update is part of the company's quarterly patch cycle. Oracle preannounced its patch release Thursday, when, for the first time, it published an advance notification so customers could plan ahead to apply the fixes.
MSBuild in Next Delphi
Nick Hodges has some interesting news about the next version of Delphi.
In a non-tech thread in the forums, Nick Hodges (Delphi Product Manager) has stated that "the next release of Delphi will use MSBuild as the build engine". This is very good news, as the Project Manager in recent versions of Delphi got some extra features and a change to install build tools, but with limited capabilities. MSBuild, instead, is the Microsoft build tool used in Visual Studio and allows developers to customize the build (and deployment) process with many different tasks.
At the moment you can achieve something similar using third-party build tools, like FinalBuilder. I think this is a very good addition, also because the same build process will be available within the IDE and fromt he command line. Moreover, you'll be able to use MSBuild also for C++ Builder (while in Visual Studio C++ compilations are not managed by MSBuild). More about this in David Dean blog.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
JEDI VCS 2.41 server release
The JVCS team is happy to announce the JEDI VCS 2.41 server release,
which is intended as a maintenance release for 2.40 but also includes some
new features.
What's changed:
-----------------
- support of MySQL5 directly out of the installer (ZEOS 6.6)
- Multiple logins with the same user is now possible which allows the simultaneous use of the standalone JVCS Client and the JVCS IDE client
- faster file transfer (get, checkout, checkin...) especially on large files and in LAN environment
- minor bug fixes
Complete change history is available through the JVCS tracker on
http://homepages.codegear.com/jedi/issuetracker
Downloads are available from here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=75615&package_id=76144
Updating is quite easy, stop the JVCS server application or the JVCS
service, run the installer, restart server application or service. There is no
database change.
JVCS 2.41 client release will follow soon.
We also will release a unstable JVCS 2.5 with branching support soon.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Vulcan and Firebird merging plan
Dmitry Yemanov posted to the Firebird-devel list his proposals for merging the Firebird 2 code with the Vulcan code.
Here it comes, with comments from others:
Key Points
----------
1) The result of the merge is a new CVS tree
2) Modules refactored by Jim are taken from the Vulcan tree
3) The rest is taken from the FB tree
4) All the pieces are adjusted to fit each other
5) Vulcan's code is fixed to use the project coding rules
Details
-------
1) The common library will mostly based on the FB
class library with some classes taken from Vulcan (QSort, SyncObject,
StatusVector, etc). The common string class is Firebird::String. The
exception handling is based on the FB classes with some changes. Based
on Alex's research, I conclude that the memory manager should be taken
from Vulcan and adapted to the FB pool infrastructure. The configuration
stuff is also taken from Vulcan.
Responsible:
- Dmitry (syncs and other platform specifics)
- Alex (memory management, classes library, exceptions)
- Adriano (config stuff) -- ???
2) The Y-valve is taken from Vulcan and fixed to fit the new common
library and the project coding conventions. An exception handling and
MT-safety review is required, as well as some cleanup.
Responsible: Dmitry
3) The lock manager is taken from Vulcan, cleaned up and reviewed. I
don't agree with the way how the two cache modes are implemented there,
it looks ugly. Also, we need to carefully examine all the Windows and
Solaris specific changes made there.
Responsible: Dmitry
4) The JRD files are merged from the both trees. The page cache code and
the metadata classes (as well as some other refactored code like blob
classes, the mover, etc) are taken from Vulcan with a careful review.
Other files (cmp/exe/dfw/etc) are taken from FB and adjusted to the
Vulcan synchronization and metadata cache classes.
Arno Brinkman commented: opt, btr, idx, Rsbxxx modules should be inherited from Vulcan IMO.
Only missing pieces are the INTL stuff, which is not that big.
//end of comment
Dmitry Yemanov commented: As for Rsb modules, I agree. The same for opt.cpp and Optimizer.cpp, as
they're already in sync with HEAD. I just want them to be ported at the end.
But why do you want to preserve Vulcan's btr.cpp and idx.cpp? AFAIK,
HEAD is more up-to-date in those parts (and more patches are in the way).
//end of comment
Responsible:
- Dmitry (synchronization, metadata, other)
- Vlad (page cache, metadata)
- Alex (execute statement, authentication)
- Adriano (INTL stuff, other)
5) The DSQL files are taken from Vulcan, with a total review of the
metadata cache integration. This is the hardest part of the merge, IMO.
I'm not satisfied with the half-way DSQL integration done in Vulcan, but
I'm not sure we can offer something better in the short term. Changes in
pass1/gen/make are ported from the FB codebase. The parser generator is
most likely to be migrated from FB, it just lacks the MT-safe skeleton
implementation. A replacement with a hand-made RDP can be considered in
the long term.
Arno Brinkman commented: Although it's for the long term, i send you something for review a long time ago?
//end of comment
Dmitry Yemanov commented: Yep, and I didn't have time to comment on it properly. Mea culpa.
//end of comment
Responsible: Vlad, Dmitry, Adriano, Alex
6) The remote subsystem is taken from Vulcan, unless Alex objects. The
multi-client mode related fixes by Alex, protocol extensions by
Alex/Vlad/myself and various bugfixes should be backported from FB.
Amount of our changes there is not very big, so it looks doable.
Responsible: Alex, Vlad, Dmitry
7) The entire INTL aware code is taken from the FB codebase, a proper
MT-related review is to be performed.
Responsible: Adriano
8) Utilities code is to be taken from FB, the only merge-related thing
is an interface with the Vulcan services provider. The UDF libraries are
taken from FB. Guardian is to be considered for dying.
Responsible: ?
Special Notes
-------------
1) The non-shared-cache mode is preserved, but it should be
implemented using the config switch rather than #ifdefs. In particular,
it means that synchronization primitives should unconditionally exist in
all engine favors.
2) The internal DSQL implementation (FbDbc) is not ported from Vulcan.
We should either make it much more light-weight (to not carry the
redundant semantics like metadata representation), or consider some
other connectivity code, or keep GDML in the sources for the time being.
Any volunteer for this task?
3) I don't expect any serious INTL issues, as most of the INTL aware
code will be taken from FB, but I expect Adriano to track all the
related changes.
4) The RSB refactoring is ported after all else is done. Being not
critical part of Vulcan/FB3, it was one of the most buggiest parts of
Vulcan and I'm not sure we solved all the issues. Also, Arno intends to
make some improvements based on that code in the meantime.
Arno Brinkman commented: Almost done, only more testing and some refactoring left.
//end of comment
Dmitry Yemanov commented: That's great :-)
//end of comment
5) If anybody not explicitly counted as an assignee above would like to
assist in some parts, it would be appreciated.
6) New code is committed into CVS on a per subsystem basis.
Merge Steps
-----------
1) HEAD is cleaned up to follow the new threading rules. It mostly means
getting rid of the non-MT code branches (including signal-based ASTs).
We could also perform whatever global cleanup we consider useful. It
could be done in a separate CVS branch, if we'd like to keep the cleaned
version reserved for production.
Status: 80% done (in my private tree).
2) Lock manager is replaced with the Vulcan's one, we perform some dbb
adjustments and global synchronizations. Scheduler is removed. At this
point we have a skeleton of the non-shared-cache implementation (based
on the CS code) that could be tested.
Status: 50% done (LM only).
3) Y-valve is ported from Vulcan, DSQL is trivially moved into the
engine. At this point we have a proper architecture in place.
Status: 50% done (Y-valve only).
4) JRD is merged. We get rid of the SUPERSERVER/SUPERCLIENT/REQUESTER
conditionals. NBACKUP is carefully reviewed for compatibility with the
Vulcan's page cache.
5) DSQL is merged. Compiled statement cache is implemented.
6) INTL is adjusted to the new code.
At this point, we can start testing the embedded mode.
7) Remote subsystem is replaced with Vulcan's one.
Here we have the server mode working.
8) Utilities and services are adjusted to the new code.
Of course, some items could be moved in time, e.g. the remote subsystem
merge could be started earlier.
Your Major Question
-------------------
Why is FB used as the background for the whole tree if many of its
subsystems will be replaced with Vulcan's ones? My answer consists of
three parts:
1) Using the FB codebase, we may have the initial steps performed
without losing the stability much (and hence test the beast
incrementally), because we replace subsystems one per one. With Vulcan
being the base point, we start with bugs everywhere.
2) Number of post-Vulcan-diverge changes in FB is really large. Tracking
them one by one is not going to work and using a visual diff tool will
be much complicated for the refactored modules. In this situation,
porting the design ideas into a working code looks easier to me.
3) Unfortunately, Vulcan's code is far from looking as a production one.
Currently, it's a mixture of FB-style and Vulcan-style code that behave
differently, with some parts being commented out or totally broken. It
requires a total cleanup, reformatting, functional review and fixing. I
doubt we can afford that now.
Comments, additions, critique?
Dmitry
Papers of Firebird Conference 2006
The papers (where available) for the Firebird Conference 2006 talks are available for download here (you need to right click and use “Save As”).
Sunday, January 07, 2007
LinuxQuestions 2006 Members' Choice Awards
LinuxQuestions.org has just launched the voting for its 2006 Members' Choice Awards. The awards enable Linux community members to select their favorite products of the year in 21 categories, including distribution, browser, office suite, desktop environment, and database.
The polls will close on Feb. 18, with winners being announced shortly afterward. Last year's winners include Ubuntu, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and MySQL. Two years ago Firebird WON!
Voting in all categories can be done here. Free registration is required at LinuxQuestions.org in order to vote.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Devrace BlazeTop (former SQLHammer) version 1.7
Devrace BlazeTop (former SQLHammer) version 1.7 is available for immediate download. Besides many fixes and enhancements it includes Firebird 2.0 support, SQL Editor optimization (text syntax highlighting) and full UNICODE support. Now you also ave an option to purchase BlazeTop for the price of 129 Euro only!
DelphiSpeedUp Delphi/BCB/BDS IDE plugin Version 2.3
A plugin for Delphi/C++Builder 5/6/7/2005, BDS 2006 and Turbo Delphi/C++/C# Professional. It speeds up the time to load the IDE and it also improves the whole speed of the IDE. This is achieved by replacing some often used RTL functions by FastCode function that are optimized for the used CPU. It also adds some caches for function that work on filenames like ExpandFileName().
Important information: All these optimizations do not affect the compiled projects in any way. They are made in memory so all the files on disk are not modified. Uninstalling DelphiSpeedUp makes every change undone because the optimizations are not persistent. They only exist in memory and are limited to the Delphi/BCB/BDS process.
WARNING: Not every access violation in DelphiSpeedUp.dll is a bug in DelphiSpeedUp. Actually many of the exceptions in the RTL package are now thrown in the DelphiSpeedUp.dll because the RTL functions are replaced by the DelphiSpeedUp functions and wrong parameters like nil-pointers, invalid pointers, ... now lead to access violations in the replacement code.
- Improves Delphi/BCB/BDS's load times
- Optimizes often used RTL functions by functions form the FastCode project
- All optimizations are done in memory and do not change any file on disk
- Adds a "Close all and kill" menu item to the "File" menu that terminates the IDE very fast
- The fast termination is used when you close the IDE while pressing the CTRL key.
- Version 2.3 (2007-01-01)
- Added: Package Import Resolver for many System.pas functions and TList/TObjectList/TInterfaceList
- Added: Some FastSys tweaks to improve speed in runtime packages
- Added: .NET's SetThreadPriority(HIGHEST) during IDE loading is now ignored (Delphi 2005, BDS 2006)
- Added: The IDE is terminated faster by pressing CTRL when closing the main form.
- Added: DelphiSpeedUp calls BeginUpdate/EndUpdate for BDS's Tool Palette during startup.
MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Open Sourced - on /.
From the Sweet Mother of Databases dept.:The code for the Falcon Storage Engine for MySQL has been released as open source. Jim Starkey, known as the father of Interbase, is behind its creation; previously he was involved with the Firebird SQL database project.
Firebird 1.5.4 Release Candidate 1
Pre-release builds of a release candidate for Firebird 1.5.4 are ready for testing.
Friday, December 29, 2006
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) .
Thursday, September 07, 2006
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/
Monday, September 04, 2006
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
Friday, September 01, 2006
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 moreThursday, August 31, 2006
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."
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
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
- Install IBProvider on a server where MSSQL works.
- Launch "SQL Server Enterprise Manager".
- Connect to MSSQL server that will work with InterBase database.
- Go to tree item "Sequrity\Linked Servers".
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 moreFirebird,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 moreFirebird 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 moreFirebird 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 moreDo 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 moreFirebird 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 moreSybase 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 moreFirebird *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 moreThe 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
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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
Monday, August 21, 2006
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
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Turbo Videos
A number of interesting videos have appeared on the DevCo Turbos web site, I guess more will be coming.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
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.
Monday, August 14, 2006
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.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
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 HodgesDelphi 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.
Monday, August 07, 2006
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
Saturday, August 05, 2006
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.
Friday, July 21, 2006
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.
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!
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
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.netFirebird: 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
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.
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
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
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/dataComment 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.
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.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
Thursday, June 22, 2006
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.
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