Author: mariuz

The web would never be the same :

http://php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

First Firebird / ibase driver was released with php version 3.0 (1998):

http://museum.php.net/php3/ 

The incremental backup utility toolset nBackup is not a friendly beast. An operational misstep can break a database. Under load, in some conditions, it can be a database-killer without any human intervention, especially under Firebird v.2.1 or v.2.0.

There’s a proviso, though. A lot of the problem code was eliminated by a thorough revamp for Firebird 2.5. The threadability of attachments in v.2.5 is also thought to have reduced some of the instability of nBackup The improvements were not backported to the v.2.1 or 2.0 series because it was structurally infeasible.

This article is not a “How-to” for using nBackup. The Firebird Project documentation for proper use of this toolset is excellent and can be read or downloaded from the Documentation pages at the Firebird web site.

A simplified overview of the autocommit code.

Here is the related thread on Firebird-devel.

Smyatkin Maxim from RedSoft proposed the following changes in this pull request for Jaybird :

Jaybird shows horrible performance in auto-commit mode while executing
lots of small queries.
Reasons:
1. Every time a statement is being executed a new transaction starts and
commits.
2. Even if there were no changes at all (e.g., simple select statement)
Jaybird starts and commits transaction.

Solution: Firebird API has its own auto-commit flag. Firebird knows for
sure if anything did actually change, so Jaybird might rely on it. As a
result:
1. It saves start and commit calls;
2. It executes commits only if something really changed;
3. Internally it works faster even if changes appeared because it doesn’t
restart a transaction.
Practical results: it allowed me to make OpenCMS work 3-5 times faster
with Firebird. I suppose it’s not the only case, because some systems
(especially the ones using ORMs) tend to execute lots of small selects.

Main changes in code are:
1. Removed AutocommitTransactionCoordinator. LocalTransactionCoordinator
with enabled autoCommit flag does exactly what we need.
2. When we change autoCoommit to true/false – we commit previous
transaction manually, so that it restarts with new TPB.

Removal of old GDS API:

The old GDS API (org.firebirdsql.gds.GDS) has been removed. This removal
includes a number of related classes and methods.

Type 2 (native) and embedded driver

Jaybird no longer needs a jaybirdxx.dll or jaybirdxx.so for the Type 2 and embedded driver. Jaybird now uses JNA to access the client library.

If you want to use the Type 2 driver, or Firebird embedded, then you need to include the jna-x.x.x.jar on the classpath. The fbclient.dll, fbembed.dll, libfbclient.so, or libfbembed.so need to be on the path.

Firebird github master branch is now on travis

https://travis-ci.org/FirebirdSQL/firebird

Build status image after each checkin :

This is a patch release with some useful fixes for the 3.6 branch

Developers are preparing the Changelog.
You can check Fixed issues in the tracker and test a build from snapshot area.

Jaybird 2.2.8 has been released. See https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/releases/tag/v2.2.8 … for details and download links.
Full release notes are here

All Jaybird releases are listed on GitHub, including release notes and/or binaries when available: https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/releases …

FDB Python driver for Firebird v1.4.6 is available for download. This is
pure bugfix release. Solves ‘weakly-referenced object no longer exists’
problem (PYFB-50)

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fdb

best regards
Pavel Cisar
IBPhoenix