Technical articles, How-tos, guides, etc.
From Jiří Činčura blog :
Yesterday I released ADO.NET provider for Firebird version 2.7.5 and there’s one feature I’d like to blog about. As you might know Firebird has a pretty old limitation on “size” of query. It’s both the string itself, but also the column datatypes and parameters used. No need to dive to details, because I’ll only talk about the first item.
FDB release 0.7.2 is out:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/fdb/0.7.2
Highlights for this release:
– Python 3 Support (thanks to Philippe Makowski)
– Support for Distributed Transactions
– Support for NBACKUP Service
– Support for Trace Service
And as always, some bugs fixed.
Main target for next version: support for Firebird Events.
Note: I’m really glad that Philippe joined the FDB team, especially to look after Python 3 support (but not only that). Thanks!
You can also read the announcement on firebird-python list
IBSurgeon just published an article about How to install Firebird 3.0 (snapshot build) on Windows. There are some differences compared to previous Firebird versions, so everyone should read this.
This article, from Dmitry Yemanov, is a must read for everyone using Firebird on more recent Windows versions, specially Windows 2008. As some people already experienced, it seems that the Windows Cache Manager intelligence in those versions of Windows are not smart enough, and can produce very bad performance for database access in some circumstances.
ХудожникMichael Van Canneyt announced his full text indexer project:
I’ve committed a file/database indexing and search engine, fpindexer, to SVN.
It was developed by Darius Blaszijk, with help from me. One of the planned uses is
to create searchable documentation. I’ve also (in a private project) used it to
implement full-text search on a database that doesn’t support that natively.
For several years now, I’m yearning for a feature that I think that all SQL based databases that I know are missing, and throw it back to the program side.
The feature I wish to have is a way to set a specific record to be valid for only a known period of time, and when the time is up, I’ll be able to do something.
In this post I’ll try to create some sort of general specification for such feature, and I hope that there will be many comments on this that will benefit everyone, and I hopeful, that they will make the idea better.
From Paul Beach’s Blog:
We are currently preparing to release Firebird 2.0.7, since I take responsinility for the Mac builds, I did a 2.0.7 build on MacOSX 10.7 using the development tools installed by XCode 4.1 (gcc 4.2.1 etc). I set up the relevant environment variables for this older 32bit only build CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, LD_FLAGS and also set the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4. The builds completed without any problems, some simple tests on MacOSX 10.7 showed no problems.
Now – Imagine my surprise when Philippe told me that when he tried to QA the builds on MacOSX 10.5 we got this error on SuperServer startup.
The technology trends we have described put SSDs in an unusual position for a cutting-edge technology: SSDs will continue to improve by some metrics (notably density
and cost per bit), but everything else about them is poised to get worse. This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive in many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications.
Not good news, specially for those thinking about using the for critical work, like database servers.
Read full research here (in English). Short article in portuguse here.
