Category: Technical Articles

Technical articles, How-tos, guides, etc.

Rebuilding a Firebird index

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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.

Migrating users from FB 2.1 to FB 2.5

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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.

#Lua Firebird Driver : fbclient 0.5.0 is released

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Cosmin Apreutesei wrote to to Lua, firebird-tools, LuaRocks mailing lists :

Good news everyone,

Firebird’s Lua binding v0.5.0 is out!

Quick changelog:

  • improved automated testing suite:
  • now testing against all 2.0-2.5 firebird and fbembed releases to date on win32 and linux32 (linux64 coming with the next version of alien)
  • server binary bundles including start/stop scripts are now available for download making it trivial to setup a testing environment
  • improved st:run()/st:fetch() handling based on statement type
  • added support for SQL_NULL type (fb 2.5+)
  • added at:sqlcode(), at:sqlstate(), at:sqlerrors(), at:errors(),at:full_status()
  • added at:start_transaction()
  • added st:row()
  • bug fixing, refactoring and documentation updates

Rockspeck and zip package here: http://code.google.com/p/fbclient/source/browse/

The next version will include a reflection module for metadata export
and schema comparison and synchronization between two databases.

Feedback welcome!
Enjoy!

PS: Could someone please update the rockspec in the LR repo, thanks!

Firebird 2.5: The Real and The Only alternative to #MySQL

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The Firebird 2.5 article is in Italian language
And here is the translation (with highlights from Firebird 2.5 press release)

l progetto Firebird ha da poco annunciato il rilascio della versione 2.5 del suo database relazionale opensource.

Le novità di questa release sono abbastanza interessanti ma ovviamente gli sforzi maggiori sono stati fatti per migliorare l’affidabilità, le performance e la scalabilità del database. Philippe Makowski, presidente della fondazione non-profit Firebird Foundation ha dichiarato che il rilascio di Firebird 2.5 è un passo importante sia per il progetto stesso, visto che cade in questi giorni il suo decimo anni di vita, che per l’intero mondo opensource.

D’altronde, come dargli torto: la comunità sta cercando ormai da un bel po’ di tempo un degno sostituto di MySQL che, nonostante i proclami di Oracle, pare sempre più lontano dall’iniziale predisposizione all’opensource. “Molti nostri clienti utilizzano senza grossi problemi database Firebird che spaziano dai 200 ai 400GB”, ha dichiarato Stewart Sping, CTO della Watermark Software. “I miglioramenti delle performance di Firebird 2.5 permetteranno sicuramente di raggiungere risultati ancora più entusiasmanti”. Firebird 2.5 è disponibile sotto forma di pacchetti binari per piattaforme Windows e Linux a 32 e 64 bit. Maggiori informazioni e download sono disponibili su questa pagina

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