Sunday, October 15, 2006

1-st Russian Firebird and InterBase conference

We did it! 14 October 2006. It went very fine. 200 visitors. ~25 people from sponsors and Firebird developers. Interesting sessions.
2-nd conference will be next year, for sure.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

IBAnalyst 2 is ready

IBAnalyst 2.0 is ready! New features list:
  • Improved algorithms of statistics analysis
  • Full Firebird 2 support
  • InterBase 2007 compatible
  • Uses InterBase and Firebird client libraries
  • Transaction Calculator - enables to understand how many transactions per seat your applications starts
  • Database size and % of tables and indices
  • Broken or incomplete indices detection
  • Many interface changes - toolbar menu, server/database list, "reload" button...
  • New statistics save format
Buy it now at ShareIt or Plimus standalone or within IBSurgeon Pack.

For those who still do not know about this perfect tool - it can take statistics from InterBase or Firebird databases, and analyze it giving complete reports about transaction state, record versions, index selectivity and other database parameters that can affect performance.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Migrating from MS SQL

David Burton started series of articles about migration from MS SQL to Firebird.

There is also "MS SQL to Firebird Migration Guide" at firebirdsql.org documentation page.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Names identity

I found that Google Alerts is sometimes useless. During 3 weeks I tried to monitor news & web about Delphi, Firebird and Interbase, and the only news I've got were about Delphi Corp. (auto-parts company), Firebird tale and Stravinsky's music, and some protocol named "interbase".

This is interesting at least because those keywords in their wanted meaning (IDE, RDBMS) can easily be found by Google search right on first results page. If you have some positive experience about Google Alert, please tell me :-)

p.s. Oh, right now got the first real alert - http://www.irishdev.com/EventDetails.aspx?id=567

Friday, September 01, 2006

Overloaded by transactions

Do you remember old InterBase 5.6 bug when maximum number of transactions in database is depending on page size ?
Strange, but early InterBase 6.0 versions have the same, sure. Yesterday we got database with the same sympthoms, but this is ODS 10.0 database with dialect 3, created with InterBase 6.0. Let's look at statistics from IBAnalyst:



Sorry about numbers format, if it is hard to read - there are 534 million transactions in database. Since January 2005. And, if this database was put into production right after creation (or restore), there are 880 thousands transactions each day.
Why I was so impressed? This works on WinXP.
While database exists 607 days (more than 1.5 years), transaction inventory page became very big - 130 megabytes (Next transaction div 4 bytes). Database size is 160 megabytes, with the only 13 megabytes data in it.

Friday, August 18, 2006

New DataDirect ODBC driver

Borland released new DataDirect ODBC driver for InterBase customers (thanks Craig for the info). Also separate ADO .Net driver for InterBase (BDP 2.5.0) available.
Both drivers are free for InterBase users, but there is another OLE DB driver that is very useful, especially for Visual Studio - IBProvider. It uses all existing and possible OLE DB features, like many transactions per one connect and others, and can provide nearly the same special InterBase functionality accessible in native components like FIBPlus and IBX.

Repair issue

Yesterday we got broken database from some popular (in tight range) commercial system. It is built on InterBase 4.1, and still being sold by developers for wide range of shops. But, sometimes in these shops server power failure happens. In this case damage was increased by old InterBase 4 bug when data in header page is being shiffled. Hopefully, information was not broken, just mixed.
Repair process was a bit tricky, and took about 3 hours. First, database needed to be repaired to work with Firebird 1.5. Second, it was repaired again. And then, it was moved back to InterBase 4 format.
Everything went fine, except 7 records in one table were completely lost. Anyway, it was a small data loss, so database now works fine.