Firebird 2.5 in the cover of ActiveDelphi
Brazilian magazine ActiveDelphi, ed. 81, brings Firebird 2.5 in the cover article. The article shows the major enhancements of the latest FB release.
Brazilian magazine ActiveDelphi, ed. 81, brings Firebird 2.5 in the cover article. The article shows the major enhancements of the latest FB release.
From Marco Cantu’s blog:
Now, this could be a very good opportunity for all of the other open source database servers (and also some of paid ones!), particularly the most popular ones like Firebird and PostgreSQL. I’m particularly fond of Firebird (the InterBase offspring) and use it in many projects and did a lot of consulting to Delphi developers using it. Can this be the rise of Firebird? MySQL with its huge popularity has certainly obscured it, so it could be a good time to act.
Morfik is used to easily develop rich Internet applications that can be run also in devices, like the iPhone. They just released the version 3 of the product, with some interesting news:
NO MORE PAY TO PLAY
With this release, we have changed the game, significantly. Now you don’t have to pay to play the game! That’s right, Morfik 3 AppsBuilder is no longer licensed. It is accessible to everyone – at no cost.
There is no catch. We are serious about enabling developers to take full advantage of the power of the Web. This is about making it as easy as possible for all to discover, use and be successful with Morfik. We want to build the community of active users, which will ultimately help you get the most out of your Morfik development environment.
I remember Morfik having a “free” version in the past, and after some time, they changed their minds and started to offer only paid/licensed versions. I hope this time they are serious about the “there is no catch” thing.
Morfik uses Firebird as its default database.
After reading news about rebuilding Firebird indexes, I wrote a procedure for Windows, which allows fully automatic rebuild all indexes in the Firebird database. The procedure is described on my website http://gskoczylas.rekord.pl/Firebird/AutoReindexAll.php (in Polish). Automatic translation into English is here: http://goo.gl/9Uu96.
At the end of the web page there is a link which allows to download the complete procedure. Procedure has been tested on Windows Vista with Firebird 2.5.
—
Regards,
Grzegorz Skoczylas
gskoczylas@gmail.com
After looking at Damyan Ivanov posix script to rebuild indexes, I saw that he was using an undocumented “implementation artifact” (thanks to Dmitry Yemanov for confirming this) to rebuild indexes (including PK and FKs indexes). What he does is to call ALTER INDEX xxxx ACTIVE, where xxxx is an already active index!
Beside the fact that trying to activate an already active index sounds “weird”, this will make Firebird to rebuild the index. Seems to be an easy way to rebuild PK/FK/UNIQs indexes (since they cannot be deactivated).
BTW, Damyan’s script will rebuild all indexes containing “text” fields in their keys. He created the script for the case where a previously created database needs to be run in a Firebird compiled with different version of the ICU libraries.
People moving to FB 2.5.0 may be asking if it is safe to copy the security2.fdb file from previous versions of Firebird to Firebird 2.5, keeping the users previously created, so avoiding to recreate them.
In theory, copying the file should work, but with no guarantees. Firebird 2.5 uses a new ODS (11.2). You can do a backup/restore in FB 2.5 to update the ODS of security2.fdb, but some problems will still persists, regarding the use of the new role RDB$ADMIN (which gives SYSDBA rights to “normal” users) – in this case, normal users who were granted RDB$ADMIN role, will have problems to use the new SQL commands CREATE/ALTER/DROP USER. Note: Firebird 2.5.1 will bring a sql script to fix this problem.
So, the safest way to move users to FB 2.5 right now, is to recreate them in Firebird 2.5, either using gsec.exe or the new CREATE USER statement.
Thanks to Dmitry Yemanov for detailed information about the problem.
Looks like Oracle decided to charge money for those who wants to use InnoDB with MySQL. InnoDB offers features like transaction control, not found in the “classic” version of MySQL. Read more here and here.
Need Transactions, Stored Procedures, Triggers, etc. and don’t wanna to pay? GO FIREBIRD!
Update: As pointed by some of our readers, InnoDB is still offered for free in the MySQL “Community” edition.
Vote now in our new poll at FirebirdNews!
Just go to the MainPage and vote direct in the right sidebar. You can choose up to 3 answers.
Norman Dunbar is working in a new documentation describing some of the Firebird internals aspects, like the database file structure, compression used on records, etc.
The document is not finished, but already contains lots of good information.
You can download the currently version at:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/manual/fb-internals.html
http://www.firebirdsql.org/pdfmanual/Firebird-Internals.pdf