Delphi for PHP's VCL for PHP supports Firebird!

According to David I , Delphi for PHP will officialy support Firebird:

"Components for database access include: Database, Table, Query, and Stored Procedure. CodeGear's InterBase (6, 6.5, 7.x and 2007) is directly supported using InterBase Express components that talk directly to the InterBase API for high performance database applications. Beyond InterBase, the following databases and database access mechanisms will also supported: ADO, ODBC and OLEDB providers, Access, FoxPro, FrontBase, FireBird, DB2, Informix (7.x), SQL Server (7 and 2000), MySQL, Oracle (8 and 9), PostGreSQL (6.x 7 and 8), SAPdb, SQLite, SQL Anywhere, and Sybase."

It will also be Open Source:

"VCL for PHP is built on several popular open source frameworks and libraries and will itself be open source."

Great news!

Database Benchmark

DevLoop has just published a free paper (US mirror) [zipped .pdf] benchmarking some popular database systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, DB2, Informix, Sybase SQL Anywhere, on Linux using JDBC. The focus here is on non-real setups where we can analyze the individual aspects that might affect system performance. The code is available (GPL) so that anyone can reproduce the results.

Hotfix #10 Rollup install for Developer Studio

New hotfixes for Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder, Turbo Delphi, Turbo Delphi for .NET, Turbo C++, and TurboC# are now available for download

DelphiSpeedUp Delphi/BCB/BDS IDE plugin Version 2.4

DelphiSpeedUp Version 2.4 is released:

• Version 2.4 (2007-02-12)
  • Added: FastCode 0.6.4
  • Added: Lots of new faster functions.
  • Added: Option "Disable FastQuit" that removes the "Close all and terminate process" menu item from the file menu.
  • Fixed: _LStrLCmp/_WStrWCmp calls from the RTL itself weren't replaced by _LStrEqual/_WStrEqual where applicatable.
  • Fixed: Package unloading hadn't correctly cleared the unit name hash table.
  • Fixed: The splash progressbar was painted over the "Registered..." text in the splash screen.
  • Fixed: French users got German menu items, a missing dcc32.de caused the menu items to be English instead of German.
  • Improved: Overhead for inlining and function splitting (_LStrCmp=>_LStrEqual) is now faster.

CodeRage 2007 Virtual Conference

CodeGear has announced a virtual online conference that will take place in the second week of March. The conference is called CodeRage. The CodeRage 2007 web site has only limited information for now, but includes the date, March 12-16. Here is the conference logo:

Delphi Astro, Delphi Spacely

Two names popping up in this delphi.non-technical thread for new Delphi versions. According to the thread:

Delphi Spacely - Delphi for Vista (Win32 and AJAX)
Delphi Astro - Delphi for PHP

The source of this information is a Swedish reseller. More info in Swedish through this link.

This sounds very interesting to me. (It's February not April so......)

Keep an eye on CodeGear for possible announcements the coming days.

Delphi IDE and RTL/VCL performance improvements

Steve Trefethen writes about Delphi improvements...
" Lately, there's been a lot of effort put into improving the Delphi IDE's UX and wanted to comment briefly that in the past week alone we've made some great progress. For example, there have been recent improvements in: IDE flicker (now nearly flicker free) Desktop .. "

Read more here

Want to run Firebird on Windows Vista?

Check out this blog post from Dmitry Kouzmenko about how to run FB on Vista and not loose performance.

The Ideal Database for Your Business?

This paper from CodeGear tries to convince users that InterBase 2007 is the best database for them. It even mentions “alternatives” like MySQL, PostgreSQL and …FIREBIRD 1.5!

Of course, like any marketing paper, it tries to show that IB is the best option But it is curious that they decided to compare IB 2007 with FB 1.5 (instead of 2.0). Also, it seems that most of their “complaints” about FB, like the lack of SMP support, etc. are features that are currently being merged from Vulcan into Firebird 3. The matter of Firebird not having an official support “entity” is shown as a “problem”, but I totally disagree with this, since there is a huge and very active community offering (very good) support for free in discussion lists, and some comercial companies too. I believe that currently Firebird support is even better than IB support from CodeGear.

Anyway, the simple fact that FB is mentioned probably will attract some attention to the project

Firebird 1.5.4 is released

The Firebird team is pleased to announce that v.1.5.4 of Firebird for
Windows and Linux is now released and awaiting your pleasure. Kits
should be available from many sites today and more over the weekend.

A number of additional retrospective fixes have been introduced for
bugs that became apparent and were fixed in the Firebird 2 tree
during the Firebird 2.0 beta cycle.

This is probably the final sub-release of Firebird 1.5.x. It adds no
new functionality, although building the software for both Classic
and SuperServer for HP-UX11 is now supported.

The Firebird Team

Evans Data Survey mentions Firebird

Today we have a survey on Open source software. If you use Open Spurce in your development, please take our survey and help influence the course of Open Source Software. Your opinions will be read by the largest platform and tools companies and you will be automatically entered into a drawing to win $500.

To take the survey, please go to:

http://www.evansdata.com/EDC_LX_2007_1.html

Ed. Note: Firebird is mentioned in 3 questions.

Choosing the right database management system

Choosing the right database management system by Arif Mohamed on ComputerWeekly.com mentions Firebird.

New nbackup (or online dump) myth

New nbackup (or online dump) myth by by Dimitri Kuzmenko

The Examiner Newspaper & Firebird

The Examiner Newspaper (Tasmania, Australia) was approached to be a supporting partner in Ken Gourlay's solo sailing endeavour around the world as a fund raising effort for research into eyesight disorders. His website was designed and built around Firebird. Thanks to Nigel Weeks for the information.

Firebird Embedded and .NET

Jiri Cincura have created a small how-to for Firebird Embedded and .NET.

Getting Started With Delphi -- A list of tutorials

An intrepid new Delphi user posted this in the newsgroups:

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to learn about Delphi.Please give me some advice to learn
Delphi for beginners.Thanks all.

Nick Hodges posted few links:

Marco Cantu's Essential Delphi Tutorial
Neil Moffat's Marvelous Delphi Basics
Liz's Delphi Tutorial
3DBuzz's Delphi Tutorials
Creating Your First Application on The Delphi Wiki
delphi.about.com's A Beginner's Guide to Delphi

BlazeTop (SQLHammer) 1.7.0.99 is available now

BlazeTop (former SQLHammer) version 1.7.0.99 is available for download

What’s new in version 1.7.0.99?

New features and enhancements:

1.Borland InterBase 2007 support has been added:

the instance_name property has been added to the server registration options;

now scripts for InterBase 2007 can have a clause BATCH START; ... BATCH EXECUTE;

2.Improved mechanism of checking Open Office data export; it enabled us to increase the performance.

Bugs fixed:

1.ALTER PROCEDURE did not operate correctly if the procedure used declared variables. Fixed.
2.The SQLEditor worked incorrectly when you commented/uncommented the selected text in the pop-up menu.

Firebird 2.0.1 RC

Release Candidate kits of Firebird 2.0.1 are now available for download at the Firebird main site.

This sub-release introduces a number of bug fixes done since the v.2.0 release in November. It does not add any new functionality to the database engine. A minor improvement is detection of Gentoo or FreeBSD during configuration.

An important reversion to 1.5 behaviour has occurred in this sub-release, as follows:

In Firebird 2.0, a deliberate restriction was imposed to prevent anyone from dropping, altering or recreating a PSQL module if it had been used since the database was opened. An attempt to prepare the DDL statement would result in an "Object in Use" exception.

Many people complained that the restriction was unacceptable because they depended on performing these metadata changes "on the fly". The restriction has therefore been removed. However, the reversion in no way implies that performing DDL on active PSQL modules is "safer" in Firebird 2.0.1 than it was in V.1.5.x.

Tooling Up With CodeGear

Zeichick's Take: Tooling Up With CodeGear by Alan Zeichick on SD Times.

Open source is good for the economy

Open source is good for the economy, according to a report published by the European Commission. More details on The Register.