INTL branch merged into HEAD (2.0)

After a short freeze

HEAD [Branch] is open for development again. You may notice some
issues trying to deal with the new ICU stuff, but they're
easy to solve. The tree is completely buildable.


Dmitry

..::firebird::..

Stored Procedure Generator Version 1 - open source

TECT Software Ltd announce the immediate availability of Stored Procedure Generator Version 1 an open source (IDPL) application which generates stored procedures for almost any Firebird or Interbase table.

..::firebird::..

Flamerobin - a new blog

Planet firebird is expanding ,now with a new
addition flamerobin blog

..::firebird::..

FreeWPS CMS supports Firebird

The FreeWPS CMS has fixed some bugs and now supports
Firebird as Backend.
Please, download freewps version >= 2.11 for firebird
support

I installed it on Fedora Core 3 with PHP 4.3.11,
FirebirdSS 1.5.2 and Apache 2.0.52, and it's
working OK.

http://www.ytztech.com/freewps/

--
Dimitrios Chr. Ioannidis
.::firebird::.

New Firebird Expert book - IBExpert

The IBExpert Book - Tools for Database Developers by Holger Klemt and Debra Miles is now available. The table of contents and sample chapters are available here. Free CD, including Firebird and IBExpert software, video tutorials and additional information, enclosed with all direct orders (while stocks last)
.::firebird::.

Second edition of DBFreeMagazine is online

In this number are included articles about Firebird, Mysql and Postgresql
Downloading of second edition is possible by registering and choosing
"download" from left menu .
Registration is free http://www.dbfreemagazine.com.br/
Latest number already passed 1500 downloads in first day!

::firebird::mysql::postgresql::

Firebird 2.0 Alpha 2 Released

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce the release today of the second
round of Firebird 2.0 public Alpha kits for immediate download and testing.

This version of Firebird 2 is an alpha version, meant for field testing
only and not for use in production.

All changes and new features are subject to further change and/or
withdrawal in subsequent alpha and beta releases, leading up to final
release. Do not assume that databases created by or upgraded to the on-disk
structure of this alpha will be upwardly compatible with subsequent test
builds/releases.

Bugs, problems, etc. can be posted to the Field Test bug tracker or to the
Firebird Development List.



Firebird 2 release contains a large number of new features. Alpha 2
includes fixes for several problems that showed up in the testing of Alpha
1. Please read the Release Notes for more details.



Downloads of builds for Linux-i686 and Win32 are currently available here:



http://firebird.sourceforge.net/index.php?op=files&id=fb2_alpha02


Feedback, input and comments re this release will be appreciated.

UPDATE: news was sent to this list of sites
::firebird::

New Evans database survey

Evans writes: "As a thank you for completing this survey, you may choose to be entered into a drawing to win $1000 (US). Please don't delay, this survey will close soon." The last time Firebird was in a Evans Data survey the results where amazing. All you need to do is to spend 10 minutes on this.

firebird

KInterbasDB 3.1.1 released

What is KInterbasDB?
--------------------
KInterbasDB is a Python extension package that implements Python
Database API 2.0-compliant support for the open source relational
database Firebird and some versions of its proprietary cousin Borland
Interbase. In addition to the minimal feature set of the standard
Python DB API, KInterbasDB also exposes nearly the entire native
client API of the database engine.

KInterbasDB is free--covered by a permissive BSD-style license that
both commercial and noncommercial users should find agreeable.


What's new in release 3.1.1?
----------------------------
KInterbasDB 3.1.1 is a maintenance release of the stable 3.1 branch.
A changelog is available here:
  http://kinterbasdb.sourceforge.net/dist_docs/changelog.txt


Where can I learn more about and download KinterbasDB?
------------------------------------------------------
  http://kinterbasdb.sourceforge.net

firebird

Review of 'SQuirreL SQL Client'

Mention of Firebird jdbc driver in this review

"Adding a new driver, for Firebird for example, is a simple case of
selecting New Driver from the menu, entering the path of the driver Jar
file, entering a sample URL and it's done. To connect to an actual
database is just as simple. Select 'Add New' from the Alias menu, select
the driver, enter the database URL (including the user name) and that's it."

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/05/05/17/216251.shtml

Blob Compress -- Some Numbers

Jim Starkey wrote on firebird-architect (after a long
discussion about advantages of compressing blobs):

 I took a "documents" table from one of my production databases and
crunched some numbers.  The table had 1,377 blob with summarized as follows:

          MIMETYPE            COUNT Average Size Average Compressed Size
----------------------------- ----- ------------ -----------------------

application/msword             768    122767             88694
application/octet-stream       420    108876             82103
application/pdf                153    1048402            896624
application/vnd.lotus-wordpro  4      41423              17888
application/vnd.ms-excel       3      79872              20694
application/vnd.rn-realmedia   9      3583755            3272342
application/x-macbinary        1      19968              1702
image/gif                      3      37806              37745
image/jpeg                     1      133523             124465
image/pjpeg                    6      245316             238838
text/html                      8      16459              4528
text/plain                     1      1                  9

The aggregate size of the blobs was 334,948,746.   The blobs represent
whatever the government workers in the city of Amesbury, Massachusetts
thought was worth sharing.  Normal content is managed in Word, which
explains the heavy skew.  The Word documents had a total of about 1200
images, mostly jpegs.

I compressed each block with zlib using default settings, writing both
the original and the compressed versions to a new table.   The aggregate
size of the compressed blobs was 271,077,508 bytes.

I started a Netfrastructure server from scratch and fetched all
uncompressed blobs of the new table.  I restarted the server and fetch
and decompressed all compressed blobs.  The elapsed time for the
uncompressed blobs was about 64 seconds, the elapse times for fetching
and decompressing the compressed blobs was about 58 seconds.

Explain how metadata comments syntax works in 2.0

Claudio Implemented the proposed COMMENT keyword to allow descriptions in database objects. Subject to change or withdrawal.

Firebird 2.0 GC implementation gives 5x boost on AS3AP multiuser benchmark

I have executed AS3AP benchmark suite with Firebird 2.0 Alpha 2 and can report approx. 5x boost for a multiuser tests with 10 OLTP tests in background and one SELECT in foreground (the last phase of AS3AP multiuser benchmark):

- Firebird 1.5 performs ~130 fetches within 30 seconds in embedded mode;

- Firebird 2.0 performs ~630 fetches within 30 seconds using wire protocol, it is slower than embedded, but fbembed.dll throws ACCESS_VIOLATION.

Good job!

Roman

UIB 2 Final Release - Yet another lazarus/firebird kind of components

New component TJvUIBConfig.

New component TJvUIBRepair.

New component TJvUIBSecurity (thanks to Volkan Ceylan).

New component TJvUIBEvents.

Rewritten TJvUIBScript to handle large script.

Corrected dataset and FPC 1.9.6 compatibility.

Improved TJvUIBDatabase to retrieve database informations.

Corrected "jvuibmetadata" to retrieve array informations.

Read/write faster NUMERIC data types. (thanks to Volkan Ceylan).

Delphi 2005 for win32 compatibility.

new compiler option: "HAVE_SYNEDIT", if you don't want to use synedit, desactivate this option in jvuib.inc.

Firebird 2 compatibility.

Again faster :)

Compatibility with previous version

In previous version of TJvUIBBackUp & TJvUIBRestore you need to implement the OnVerbose event to wait for the end of the operation. Now you also have to set the new "verbose" property to true.

If you use the dataset with persistent BCD fields you have to regenerate them

http://www.progdigy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1

FIBL 0.6 - FreeIBComponents for Lazarus

Version 0.6 is released to sourceforge area

FIB for Lazarus (FIBL) is a FreePascal/FCL port of FIB - well known 
components library for access to Interbase/Firebird database server. 
The aim of this project is to provide high quality components library 
to access Firebird server for Lazarus IDE.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Installation
----------------------------------------------------------------------

- Install Firebird client software to your computer.
- Copy folder with FIBL to your computer, run Lazarus and install 
  package fiblaz.lpk.

Zeos CVS and Lazarus - another method to connect

antonio moneto wrote on the lazarus site
"I finished the necessary modifications so that zeoslib 6.1.5 functioned of satisfactory form in lazarus.
I placed patch with the necessary modifications in http://sourceforge.net/projects/zeoslib in the section patches. I also declared what it is functioning and what still need modifications, but believe that to have zeoslib functioning (exactly that with some errors) it is a great advance and it comes to add a powerful tool of access the data base and wait to count on the aid of all to become it 100% functionary with the Lazarus"

From the patches comment there are some problems with firebird . Good news is now many firebird database components for lazarus exists.

Sqlite Versus Firebird

Sqlite Versus Firebird - Firebird is open source, cross platform, embeddable, has wrappers for many language. Firebird is a full
featured database and has a footprint of 2-3 MByte. A good choice when SQLite is too lite. Firebird can be used free of charge even
for closed source projects.

Paul Beach

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

FreePascal+Lazarus: Delphi developers you can start migrating to Linux!

Cabelo writes "Steady, interface of development RAD, visual components of access the data base (Firebird, Interbase and others), components and much more. In this article, we will develop a graphical application as if we were practically using the proper o Delphi.

Click here

Excuse-me my Bad English ;-) () Translate in Google.

[Web Masters note: I would appreciate a more complete translation if someone can provide it. Thanks]"

FIBL - FreeIBComponents for Lazarus

ssy writes "I have released the first beta version of FIBL - FreeIBComponents port for Lazarus.
This version is win32 only and support Firebird 1.5-2.0 servers through fbclient.dll.
It is not tested very good, so try it and report a bugs please.

sourceforge.net/projects/fibl"

Firebird World Conference 2005

The world-wide Firebird Conference will take place at the
Hotel Olsanka in Prague, Czech Republic, from the evening of Sunday, November 13 (opening session) until the evening of
Tuesday, November 15 (closing session). There will be a dedicated web-page once we have more details to announce.

-- Firebird Foundation

The Firebird Book goes electronic!

The good news for for those who were waiting for a version of "The Firebird Book" to keep online for reference is that Apress has made an e-Book version available at approximately half the price of the real book.

kinterbasdb (python) on 64bit

David Rushby responded about 64bit issue

> Things are indeed very stable now, at least on 32-bit machines. But
> 64-bit machines are catching on, along with Firebird going to 2.x,
> both of which will probably entail changes in python and kinterbasdb.

There was a trivial preprocessor-related problem that prevented
kinterbasdb 3.1 from compiling out of the box with Firebird 2.0a1, but
that's fixed in both CVS HEAD and the maint-3-1 branch.

I tested kinterbasdb on 64-bit Linux (Fedora Core/AMD64) with
prereleases of Firebird 1.5.1 about a year ago
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=8356329 ), and
have continued to do so since. There were two or three 64-bit
cleanness issues in kinterbasdb back then, which I fixed.

A more likely source of problems (though not on AMD64) is
big-endianness. I haven't so much as compiled kinterbasdb, or any
other software, on a big-endian machine. Even though I have an
adequate understanding of endianness, it'd be easy to let a bug of that
sort slip by at 02:15 some morning. I suppose I could use the SF
compile farm for that purpose, but I haven't gotten around to it.

The intersection of the Firebird and Python

David Rushby wrote on firebird-python group:

The intersection of the Firebird and Python communities is small, and I
make next to no attempt to market kinterbasdb. However, I attribute
the slowdown of activity on the kinterbasdb SF forum and the lack of it
here more to the increasing stability of the code and the expansion of
the documentation than to the atrophy of the user community. SF
project stats haven't worked for months, so I can't draw conclusions
from them, but hits to the front page haven't decreased.

I don't have much time to work on kinterbasdb right now anyway, so the
lack of activity suits me fine.

At the top of my kinterbasdb agenda is fixing a bug in the garbage
collection of event queues that can cause a segfault upon process exit.
After that's solved, or if I fail to solve it in a timely manner, I
plan to release 3.1.1, which'll contain a few minor fixes.

For 3.2, here are some planned features listed in descending order by
their urgency to me:

---

1) Streaming blob support:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1194897&forum_id=30917

2) Better support for concurrency, probably not enabled in default
builds due to the concurrency limitations in the local Windows protocol
implemented by FB <= 1.5. 
3) Allow the client programmer the option of explicitly controlling statement 
preparation in a manner decoupled from execution. kinterbasdb currently exposes 
no way for the client programmer to control the caching of prepared statements; 
it's performed behind the scenes, and rather simplistically. 
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1120117&forum_id=30917

4) More dynamic Unicode support. This one is a low priority for me, so
even after 3.2 development gets underway, it'll probably take another
Jacobi-prompt to trigger a detailed discussion and subsequent
implementation of this particular feature.
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1080135&forum_id=30917

---

A few 3.2 features have already been implemented in CVS HEAD:
- An official implementation of dynamic type translator support for
Python 2.4's standard library decimal module.
- A more convenient alternative to Connection.database_info, called
Connection.db_info, was contributed by Pavel Cisar.

I don't know when I'll get underway with the implementation of 3.2 in
earnest, but it'll probably be some months yet (circa October 2005,
maybe?). I hope to find the time to implement streaming blob support
sooner, since its absence is a serious problem for some users rather
than merely an inconvenience.

Enterprise Library for Firebid moved to GotDotNet

I finally decided to host my project on GotDotNet.

I will publish there new releases, news (with RSS feeds!) and so on. Here
you can find a bug tracker and a message board: please feel free to use them!


Right now, I've moved here the first two releases (0.6 and 0.7.0). Maybe
in a few days I will begin using the source control.

I do believe this will benefit Firebird .NET users!


PPS: Now that the beta 2 is out, in a few days I'll begin working on a membership
API provider. Probably I will build it against FirebirdClient 2.0.

--
Andrea Sansottera
Weblog [Italian]: http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/andrew

lazarus and firebird - mini howto

The concept is exactly the same as in Delphi: you have a TDataset descendent which
accesses the database of your choice. Possible are:
- MySQL (not recommended, MySQL API is unstable: it changes too frequently)
- PostGreSQL
- Firebird/Interbase (Recommended)
- SQLite (not recommended for CGI apps)
- Simple DBF.

To start, install the latest lazarus, and install the SQLBDLaz package.
After that, there should be a TSQLQuery component and some connection
components (one for each database). Set the SQL property, connect the
TSQLQuery to the appropriate connection and you should be all set.

Recently, ZeosLib was ported to Lazarus, so that should be usable as
well, but I haven't seen an installation package yet.

Michael Van Canneyt

Update :

You can install the SQLDBLaz package in Lazarus  by choosing Components 
-> Open package file and choose \components\sqldb\sqldblaz.lpk

See also: http://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.net/kb/index.php/Install_Packages 
Feel free to update these documentation, if something is not clear enough.

Regards,

Vincent