I have updated the FirebirdNews site with two new WordPress plugins, allowing people to reply comments, and vote for posts. Both options are very easy to use, and probably you already noticed how to use them 😉
The intention is that FirebirdNews readers also participate/interact with the site. Go on! Vote for your preferred posts, and don’t hesitate to post comments if you think you have something to say!
Dr. Dobbs published a review of the new Delphi 2010, and mentions the new official support for Firebird:
RAD Studio 2010 database drivers have also been updated to support the latest well-known name SQL DBMS’s including IBM DB2 8, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, MySQL 5.1 and Oracle 11g. Also added to this release is support for the sexy, high-performance, open-source Firebird 1.5 RDBMS, showing that Embarcadero is hip with the times by not standing idle with just supporting updates for the entrenched players.
From IBSurgeon on Tweeter – Harvard Business School: “The Business of Free Software” http://bit.ly/3Hn4ZV Firebird is in top 20 OSS list – not clear how it was counted.
Today I needed to convert a Delphi/Pascal code to Firebird PSQL. Part of the code used the integer value of a date to do some calcs. First, I tried to use Firebird CAST to convert a Date to Integer, but FB can’t do this type of cast (anyway, I’m not sure if the result would be the same as Delphi, since I don’t know what starting date Firebird uses for internal storage). So, the solution was to create a workaround and subtract the date from 30-December-1899 (Dublin Julian Day), ie:
my_int_var = current_date – cast(‘30.12.1899’ as date);
The above line will return the integer value of the today date, as Delphi/Pascal would do. In other words, it is the number of days since 30-Dec-1899.
Which of the following databases are most used within your organization?
You can participate in this survey and vote for Firebird clicking here.
Sorry, only for portuguese speakers.
Acaba de ser lançado o FDD MegaPack DVD, contendo palestras da segunda, quarta, quinta e sexta edições do Firebird Developers Day. Pedidos on-line através do site da FireBase.
The team is pleased to announce the release of Firebird 2.1.3, with kits available for Linux and Windows 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. For notes about the release, click here.
I work for a small company (fewer than 10 employees). We want to upgrade our primary server hardware this year.
Current server is a HP ML330 G3 with a single Xeon @ 2.8 Ghz, 3GB ram, Raid5 consisting of three 15krpm Ultra320 SCSI drives. OS is Windows 2000 Server.
Our current CPU features hyperthreading, which is enabled. The motherboard is a dual socket board, so initially I was shopping for a second identical CPU (because they’re as cheap as $15 on eBay). But after running some tests, I don’t think it would benefit us.
Our ERP software uses Interbase version 5.6, which does not appear to be multi-threaded based on my tests. I contacted the developer of our ERP package, and they confirmed this: Interbase will NOT utilize multiple physical or logical CPUs. More recent revisions of our ERP software have switched to Firebird db server, which I’ve learned is not multi-thread aware either. This sounds terribly old-fashioned, since modern CPUs are trending toward higher core-count.
Read full post and make your suggestions here.
The new version (8.5 beta) of the Data Modeling tool “E/R Studio” (from Embarcadero) introduces official support for Firebird. Based on past information, you can expect more and more Embarcadero tools officially supporting Firebird in the near future.
An interesting “report” about the results of switching from Hard-Drives to SSD technology in a Firebird sever machine was posted in Firebird-Devel list by Poul Dige. In his specific case, the improvements of speed was very good. You can read the message here.
