Firebird seminar in Prague

9 November, in Prague, in the series of Firebird events, there was a Firebird seminar. It was organized by IBPhoenix, IBSurgeon and FastReport with the great help of Pavel Cisar, IBPhoenix representative in Czech Republic. Sessions by main Firebird developer Dmitry Emanov, Dmitry Kuzmenko (IBSurgeon) and Mike Philippenko (FastReport), described Firebird roadmap, internals, security, optimization, database repair, and more.
There was about ~50 attendees, from different cities and companies. We had enjoyed interesting questions. It's nice to see that Firebird in Czech Republic and France (where seminar was at 30 October, in Paris) has strong and growing position and used by many professionals.

So, everything went fine, including coffe-breaks and lunch :-) Pavel Cizar found and arranged excellent place with suitable seats, nice personnel and good coffee and meal.

The next in the Firebird Events will be 2nd Firebird and InterBase Russian Conference, 23 november, and Firebird seminar in Warsaw, Poland, 7 december.

Firebird seminar in France

30 October 2007, in Paris, France, there will be free seminar, organized by IBSurgeon (www.ib-aid.com), IBPhoenix France (www.ibphoenix.fr), Fast Reports (www.fast-report.com) and Mandriva (www.mandriva.com).
Speakers at seminars will be Paul Beach, President of Firebird Foundation, with keynote and Firebird news, Vlad Khorsun, Firebird core developer, Dmitry Kuzmenko, IBSurgeon CEO and recovery and optimization expert, Mike Filippenko, Fast Reports CEO, and Philippe Makowski, vice-president of Firebird Foundation and chief consultant at IBPhoenix France.
Seminar is devoted to the Firebird project news and Firebird 2.1 release features, to new IBSurgeon and Fast Reports tools and technologies in database protection, reporting and business intelligence with Firebird, and more.
There will be round table with Firebird developers and experts in the end of seminar.

Seminar will take place at 43 rue d’Aboukir 75002 Paris. Seminar is free for attendees.
Registration is here: http://www.ibphoenix.fr/spip.php?article79, it will be closed at early Monday, and only 3 seats remained now.

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.

Firebird Developer Pack from IBPhoenix

IBPhoenix announced a comprehensive set of tools for professional Firebird database application development - "IBPhoenix Firebird Developer Pack". This pack includes

• Firebird database engine
• Tools for database application development and management
• Tools for database monitoring and optimization
• Tools for database recovery and maintenance
• Replication tools
• Database connectivity drivers: .NET (with Visual Studio integration), Delphi/C++Builder, ODBC, JDBC, PHP, Ruby On Rails, Python, Perl, C++.
• Flexible reporting solution
• A comprehensive documentation set for Firebird
• Free 30-days installation support

This pack costs $799 for single developer, and there are also special discount for current customers of IBReplicator, IBSurgeon products or Database Workbench.

IBFirstAid 2.0

Today new version of IBFirstAid is released. In short, now there are 2 separate versions - for Firebird and Interbase, both have lot of improvements.
Read details at www.ib-aid.com.

Does InterBase run on Windows Vista?

Thanks to Fredrik Haglund for his post about this question.
There are some issues with License Management, Local protocol (same as for Firebird, but IPCName can't be changed in ibconfig, as I know), and IBConsole.

Does Firebird run on Windows Vista ?

Yes, it does!

Of course, you want to know the details. Here they are.
I used Vista Business that I've got some days ago from Microsoft. First I tried to install Firebird 2.01 RC1 distributive, and it went fine. Sorry, I have not tested Classic yet, but at least there are no problems with SuperServer.
Since lot of public tests show that Windows Vista is slower than Windows XP at least for games, I thought that for the first time "backup test" will be enough to understand is there any performance loss.

My desktop system is:
AMD 64 3500+ (socket 939)
1GB RAM
EPOX-9NPA3 Ultra (Nforce 4 Ultra chipset)
NVidia GF 7600GT

and 3 hard disks
system: HDS728080PLAT20, IDE, IBM/Hitachi, 80gb
second: ST3200827AS, SATAII, Seagate, 200gb
third: HDS728080PLA380, SATA, IBM/Hitachi, 80gb

Vista index of this computer is 4.2 (hdd and graphics are good - ~5.5, but processor and memory not - ~4.3).

I used 2gb database and run gbak -b -g using local protocol, tcp (localhost) and services api. Right now I don't want to go into test details, because it will be special article, not a blog record. So, here are just common results:

• local protocol is not working on Vista, if Firebird runs as service. This is a classic error "unavailable database", which happens when program and Firebird works as service, sometimes when program runs as application, and in some other unknown conditions.
  Really this is not painful, because I think that Firebird (or InterBase) must not be run as service on developer's computer. If you run Firebird as fbserver -a, local protocol will work on Vista, but ~20% slower than on Windows XP. So, get into the way to use tcp (localhost) connection.
• Backup using services and tcp show the same speed as on Windows XP.
• Using -v (console output) gbak option makes backup process ~2-3% slower than on Windows XP. This is because console output on Windows Vista is made via 3D graphics (new Vista GUI interface).

So, you can move to Windows Vista and continue to use Firebird without any performance loss (excluding local protocol). Of course, you should not use Vista as "peer-to-peer" server, because it will be waste of new graphics user interface. If you have some dedicated, not powerful computer as Firebird server - use Windows NT, Windows 2000, and maybe Windows XP, but not Windows Vista.