Friday, August 10, 2007

InterBase 2007 Service Pack 2

While the SP1 was the only small bugfix and Vista fix, SP2 can be named something like InterBase 2007.5. Because it have some new interesting functionality:
  • Journal preallocation - you may specify initial journal size
  • Database file preallocations - you may specify initial database size
  • DESCRIPTOR parameters for UDFs - ability to pass different data types at runtime, while parameter type is not specified in UDF declaration
  • Query optimizer improvements:
    • shortcut boolean expression evaluation
    • redundant index usage in query disjuncts
    • outer join and sort/merge optimization
    • invariant False restrictions in queries
Also to protect databases from OS and hardware failures database write mode for new databases by default now is SYNC.

You can find full description of these new features in IB2007UpdateGuide.pdf, which can be found after installing this update in Doc subdirectory. But, as always, we suggest you to save the whole Bin subdirectory of existing IB2007 installation before applying Service Pack 2.
At least it will be wery good to save ibserver.exe, gfix.exe and gbak.exe - if you will find some unusual or unwanted in this SP2, you will have an ability to return to SP1 as fast as possible simply moving these files back to the bin directory.

p.s. this is not approved, but some people have problems with journal archive after installing SP2. So if you use this functionality, save your journal archive also before installing SP2. We are investigating this issue, and soon provide the details - is this problem really exist or not.