Fatal lock manager error: semaphores are exhausted

If you get this message in firebird.log
Fatal lock manager error: semaphores are exhausted, errno: 1

It means that you sould try to increase semaphores count in firebird.conf.
Applications at Linux use semaphores to interchange data. More interesting question is why semaphores are exhausted? The most common answer is that some other software (probably, it was developed not well enough), that starts before Firebird, consumes significant amount of semaphores from OS.
Firebird itself is modest in terms of semaphores.

Thus, maybe you need not to increase semaphores count, but check order of programs being started at OS start. Also maybe you will need to increase semaphores count in OS configuration (and recompile the OS kernel, if needed).

Naming Generators

There is no rules to name generator, of course. Because generators does not have any relation to it's usage. When generator is being used in trigger or procedure, you can track dependencies in rdb$dependencies table.
But, during repair services for some databases, we found that generators may not have any understandable relation with table, trigger or procedure. Moreover, we couldn't compute any relation with generator and max of primary key value.

So, we decided that there must be some guides to name generators in InterBase/Firebird. For example, it can be gen_<table_name>_id. Otherwise, how else generator can be correlated with the table in this case?

Firebird RDBMS at russian conferences

In the second part of April there are 3 conferences in Moscow, Russia, where will be Firebird sessions:

• RIT-2008, Russian Internet Technologies Forum, April 14-15
  
• Interop 2008, 3-rd Exibition of Corporate Internet Techologies, April 23-24
• Corporate Database Systems 2008, April 24-25

Sessions will be presented by Dmitry Emanov, the leader of Firebird development team, and by Dmitry Kuzmenko, CEO of IBSurgeon.

Seminar in Munich, 24 January 2008

We'd like to invite German developers to our free seminar in Munich, Germany, Jan 24.

Agenda:

• New in Firebird 2.1, Vladislav Khorsun, developer Firebird
• Fast Reports Business Intelligence solutions for Developers, Michael Philippenko, CEO Fast Reports
• Corruption fighting and Firebird database protection, Dmitry Kuzmenko, CEO IBSurgeon
• Fast Reports new products and solutions, Michael Philippenko, CEO Fast Reports
• Firebird optimization, Dmitry Kuzmenko, CEO IBSurgeon

Seats are limited, please register now:
http://fast-report.com/en/subscribe_seminar.html

195 defects in source code? Not ours.

InformationWeek mentions Firebird. As a "somewhat moribund project". Nice.
And, the real fact is that: "Nearly all of the 195 identified defects are in fact actually within an external piece of code we use for character sets and collation sequences ICU".

Christmas discount - 20% off

Dear Friends!

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Firebird and FastReports seminar in Warsaw

Sorry for being late, and sorry for short seminar desctoption :-)
Series of world-wide Firebird seminars ended this year with seminar in Warsaw. This was a special seminar, because it was organized by www.SoftKey.pl. Great thanks to Masha Kostrzebska - everything went great, and also hotel (Lord) was very fine (better than in Prague, and definitely better than in Paris - those who were in Paris hotels will understand me).
Also there was a first experiment with translation - thanks to Yan).
~50 people visited the seminar. ~90% of them used both the FastReport and Firebird.
In common, everyone was satisfied by the seminar - speakers, organizers, and attendees, of course.

Photos from the seminar.

p.s. we and SoftKey.pl said that all seminar visitors will get 15% discount on all IBSurgeon products at SoftKey.pl. Right now we are sorry that not all of our produtcs are available at this electronic software shop. We will fix this soon, and discount will not be limited only for this year.