Cantu, Author at Firebird News

LinuxQuestions database poll

January 7, 2007 Cantu Leave a comment

Every year, the site LinuxQuestions publishes a poll to check what is the preferred database for Linux users. It is your chance to vote for Firebird. You can vote here (need to login).

Poll about auto-index stats update in FB

January 5, 2007 Cantu 3 comments

Dear users,
I work at a project related to a possibility to have the index statistics auto-updated and humbly I ask your opinion. Please feel free to vote below.
TIA,
m. Th.

PollPub.com Vote

How do you look a possible implementation of Auto update index statistics in Firebird?

SEFIP is an application used by almost 1.5 millions of companies in Brazil to collect/pay social welfare tributes. It is distributed by Caixa Econômica Federal (a federal bank), and in its latest version (8.3) it replaced InterBase 6.0 with Firebird. With this change, Firebird embedded installed servers base in Brazil grow in some millions.

You can find the announcement here (in portuguese – self extract exe containing a PDF file).

Happy New Year!

December 29, 2006 Cantu Leave a comment

FirebirdNews would like to wish all Firebird users and developers a very happy new year! It seems that 2007 will be a very exciting year for Firebird, with two scheduled releases (2.1 and 3.0).

Who is better?

December 28, 2006 Cantu Leave a comment

A quite interesting message/answer posted by Ann Harrison in the Firebird-Architect discussion list.

Re: [Firebird-Architect] Firdbird 2.0 vs the World
Posted by: “Ann W. Harrison”
Date: Thu Dec 28, 2006 8:55 am ((PST))

rvbyron wrote:
open source databases, however, the list is not very extensive. Further,most of the comparisons are not referencing Firebird 2.0, but an earlier version of Firebird.

[See remaining text…]

As you point out, legitimate comparisons are very hard to do and really can be done only by groups that include
experts in each database – something that the open source world hasn’t found the time or energy to do.

There was a recent thread on the support list comparing
Firebird to Postgres.

I am hoping that someone could point me in the direction of something that would tell me:
* Why is Firebird 2.0 better than MySQL or Postgres?

None of the three is better than the others in general – each is better in some cases and worse in others. Postgres is very extensible and has lots of built-in features for GIS data. MySQL allows you to copy tables between databases (feature or bug?) and has several different storage engines for different purposes and lots of interesting non-standard features. Firebird has better support for character sets and collations than either of the others. Firebird has an embedded configuration. Postgres doesn’t, and MySQL hasn’t built one for its 5.0 release.

Firebird and Postgres are free for all uses. MySQL requires a paid license for commercial redistribution. If you’re thinking of packaging and selling an application, Firebird probably fights back less than the others because the database is a single file rather than a directory tree and the embedded configuration is self-contained.

* Feature per feature, how does Firebird 2.0 stack up?

Pretty well in standard compliance and feature consistency. Postgres is also good here. MySQL tends to be quirkier.

* Are there comparisons showing Administrative, Programmatic, and Performance between the databases (including Firebird 2.0)?

No, and several of the best administration tools are cross platform, as are interfaces like JDBC and OLE DB. Performance is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I’ve seen benchmarks that show that Firebird beats the others, and benchmarks where it doesn’t. Here’s one set from SQLite…

http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=SpeedComparison

An article from one or more of you who are knowledgeable in the subject could really help out the adoption of FB 2.0.

A few success stories would help too.

Best,

Ann

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Do you want to speak at fisl 8?

December 27, 2006 Cantu One comment

Reaching its 8th edition, the International Free Software Forum stands
as a remarkable spot in the Brazilian and International FOSS event’s
calendar. On this coming edition, we strived to improve the quality of
the event’s program, and to adequate it to the suggestions of the
former years researches. To achieve it, we overhauled the event tracks,
including and merging tracks as needed.
Read more here.

PS: Deadline for papers submissions is 7-Jan-2007.

New version FreeAdhocUDF

December 26, 2006 Cantu 4 comments

Today 2006-12-21 the new version adhoc20061221 is ready for download at ftp://ftp.adhoc-data.de or http://www.ibexpert.com/download
Also there is a new website for all around the FreeAdhocUDF at
http://www.udf.adhoc-data.de.

The new version is the first (and only?) UDF-library which supports all the new features in FireBird 2.0 (f.e. returning of NULL in UDFs). The new version is also the first UDF-library compatible and tested on InterBase2007.
There are now 295 functions in the FreeAdhocUDF. The FreeAdhocUDF returns the same values in Windows and Linux and in InterBase and FireBird so you can Backup/Restore from Windwos to Linux and from InterBase to FireBird.

Merry Christmas

December 20, 2006 Cantu One comment

FirebirdNews.org wishes every Firebird lover a Merry Christmas! Site will be online 24×7, but you can notice some delayed posts, since some authors should be out for Christmas vacations, etc 😉

A special thanks goes for Marius Popa for his help posting news in the site!

Altering procedures in use

December 20, 2006 Cantu Leave a comment

From Dmitry Yemanov: As you might know, Firebird 2.0 no longer allows to alter/drop procedures that are used by active statements. However, we’ve got many requests from customers to restore the previous behaviour, because now it’s impossible to upgrade metadata under load. While we don’t consider this practice safe, I’d like to report that the new limitation is removed in the v2.0.1 release, thus rolling back to the prior logic. All potentially confusing situations (when two different versions of the procedure may coexist in memory simultaneously) are reported in firebird.log.

Firebird Roadmap 2007