Interview with Vlad Khorsun

Here is an interview with Vlad Khorsun, done for the Brazilian ActiveDelphi Magazine. Vlad will be in Brazil in the beginning of July, to speak at the Firebird Developers Day. Keep reading to know a bit more about one of the Core Developers of Firebird:

1) Tell us a bit about you: age, where you was born, family, music style, hobbies, etc.

Well, my name is Vladyslav Khorsun, but friends prefer to call me just Vlad. I was born and still live at Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. I’m 35 years old, married, have a little son. My main hobby (except of programming) is music. In school\university i even played on guitar but currently i have much less time for it. In music, I like mostly old good groups like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes and of course my favorite King Crimson.

2) How did you “meet” Firebird for the first time?

I worked in small company at last year of my study in the university (it was 1995). We used there FoxPro for DOS and Delphi 1 + BDE for Windows (do you remember Windows 3.1 ? 🙂 ). We looked for something more interesting that dbf\paradox files and tried to work with Interbase.

After that, I changed my work and in new company MS SQL Server was already used. So i obtained real expirience with “serious” SQL based client-server DBMS. Then me and my friends started small private project and I choosed Interbase to work with. It was IB 5.1 with a lot of bugs 🙂 When Firebird arrives and became more or less stable (near version 0.9.4, IIRC) we switched to it.

3) What made you want to put your hands in the source code?

Bug’s 🙂 I wrote replicator for our private project and used 2PC transactions. There was issues with broken connections (replication occurs via dial-up lines of bad quality) and I first looked into Firebird sources in attempt to fix it.

4) Why and how did you decide to join the developers team?

Appetite comes with eating 🙂 It was already interesting for me how such complex software as sql server is made, what is inside it, etc. Also, I have had an issues with garbage collection and broken indices in my private project. Therefore I start to learn sources in deep. Then I implemented EXECUTE BLOCK and default values for stored procedures parameters and it was my first non-trivial contribution.

After that, I reworked internals of garbage collector and Dmitry offers me to join the team.

5) In your opinion, what are the major challenges for FB in the near future?

From the marketing POV – visibility.
From the technical POV – better SMP support, better availability and scalability.
From the growth POV – we have a small team and very limited finance.

6) Why do you think Firebird doesn’t have so much exposition in the media, as MySQL and PostgreSQL has?

Somebody must do it. At regular basis. Firebird have no company behind it, have no extra money so nobody do marketing, etc.

7) What was your major/more important contributions to Firebird up to now, speaking regarding features?

It is hard to said. For some people GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLES, for example, is important feature while for another people its useless. I think recent extension to EXECUTE STATEMENT allowing to query another databases is important enough. As for me – every feature I made (or help to made) is important, else why to do it ? 🙂

8) What are your expectations for your first visit to Brazil and FDD?

Meet interesting people, look at beautiful country, talk about Firebird with people for whom it is really interesting.

9) What are the goods and the bads (if any) of working for Firebird?

Mostly goods 😉 It is very interesting to work on such project used by so many people in the whole world. It is very interesting to work with such people as Dmitry, Alex, Claudio,  Adriano, etc.

10) What can you tell us about Firebird usage in Ukraine?

I have no official stats of course but i know it is widely used. It is often not stated in public. I think in Brazil, Russia, EU, etc picture is almost the same.

11) What is cooking in your private FB branch right now?

Currently most forces is to release 2.5 and start 3.0 in time.

12) What features you would like to develop for Firebird, but for some reason weren’t able to do so yet (and why)?

I want to improve and probably redesign IO subsystem but this task is not for the one day (or week (or month))

13) Did you use or have experience with any other RDBMS?

Yes, with MS SQL server since 1998.

14) How new features are added to the project, in terms of who decides what will be added and when?

We look at other DBMS for useful features, look at Firebird to improve existing features, look at tracker and our mailing lists for ideas from community. When someone see a feature he would like to implement he usually prepare RFC for public discussion. If feature is not rejected it could be implemented. There is no single person who dictates what and who must do. We have some common tasks as project, for example SMP in v3, on which we all works together. And everyone have something in own plans. We just have no enough time to implement all we want at one day 😉

15) Thanks, anything more you would like to speak for the Brazilians?

I know Brasil have large Firebird community, probably largest in the world. I want to thanks all that people for believe in Firebird and wish them a new releases which would satisfy they needs and probably make they life easier and more interesting.