Month: October 2023

Firebird Performance Comparer (FBPC)

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In my two presentations at the 20th Firebird Developers Day, I introduced firsthand the tool I created to help compare the performance between two Firebird servers (>= 2.5) in an easy and visual way.

This tool actually helped to detect a performance regression in Firebird 5 beta, which was resolved after I reported it to the core developers. The intention is to identify optimizer regressions or low performance issues in Firebird itself, or even the breaking of SQL commands due to new reserved words or syntax restrictions.

I’m making version 1.0 beta available for anyone interested. It’s a version that so far has been tested only by me, so it may and probably does have some bugs.

The FBPC runs on Windows and internally uses Firebird 5 RC1 embedded to store the tests and their results. When you run the application for the first time, it will display instructions on how to use it.

In summary, it helps you create a trace.conf to capture SQL commands executed on a Firebird server 2.5 or higher in a production environment. Then, the tool parses the file and collect the statements, allowing you to run them in a controlled environment of servers, specifying test rounds where the execution time between server1 and server2 is compared and displayed in an intuitive and visual way, enabling you to detect regressions or even commands that could not be executed due to new reserved words or syntax restrictions imposed in new versions of the DBMS.

RedExpert 2023.10.1 has been released

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You can join to the Telegram chat for discussion.

New version of RedExpert 2023.10.1 is available.

Added:

  1. “Properties” tab on the database table editing panel.
  2. Configuring SQL templates from the Menu -> Tools.
  3. Checkbox “Automatic text wrapping” in the text browser of data with the BLOB type.
  4. Ability to specify a relative path to the log file in the settings.
  5. View blobs of PDF type.
  6. Autocomplete when editing table triggers for <new.> and <old.>.
  7. Ability to change column position.
  8. Ability to (not)check changes in column positions during DB comparison.
  9. Changing a cursor in the Query Editor while holding down the CTRL button when hovering over an object that can be opened.
  10. Restart the application only after saving several settings
  11. Target and source database exchange button on the comparison panel.

Fixed:

  1. ODBC driver support has been terminated.
  2. Recreation a role when adding a comment  for it.
  3. Errors of editing table foreign keys.
  4. Inability to add a comment to the index through the editing window.
  5. Adding extra versions of Red Expert to the list of Windows applications when installing a new version of the application over the old one.
  6. Action taken when clicking the Select Displayed Dataset Columns button when the Results Pane is closed.
  7. Selecting  table rows to be deleted after closing the “Data” tab and canceling the deletion.
  8. An error when the “Close all tabs” button did not close all tabs.
  9. Incorrect error handling during update.
  10. Syntax highlighting for multi-line identifiers.
  11. Application crash if user settings are broken.
  12. DDL generation for ARRAY, NUMERIC and DECIMAL columns.
  13. Improved autocomplete support for Firebird aliases and keywords.
  14. Working with tables with name length more than31
  15. Updated links for automatic Java downloads.
  16. Unreasonable memory consumption.
  17. Incorrect display of the red_expert.ico file.
  18. Functioning of such application settings as:
    1. highlighting the current line;
    2. number of saved log files;
    3. selected text color;
    4. alternative editor background;
    5. editor font color;
    6. alternative highlight color.

Download and install the new version.

Firebird Foundation New Officers and Committee

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Annual General Meeting of Firebird Foundation is finished, and the new Officers and Committee were elected and start to work:

President of Firebird Foundation: Alexey Kovyazin
Vice-President of Firebird Foundation: Pavel Cisar
Treasurer and Secretary of Firebird Foundation: Jason L. Wharton

Committee Members:

  • Jiri Cincura
  • Adriano dos Santos Fernandes
  • Magnus Johansson
  • Stephanie McColl
  • Roman Simakov
  • Dmitry Yemanov
  • Lucas Franzen
  • Matthew Nielsen
  • Fabio Codebue