Author: Cantu

I'm the owner of the www.Firebase.com.br site and the author of the books Firebird Essencial, Firebird 2 and Migration Guide to Firebird 3. Loving Firebird even before it was born!

Practical Migration Guide To Firebird 5.0

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The “Practical Migration Guide to Firebird 5.0,” authored by D. Simonov, is a free technical manual that describes the main steps for upgrading to Firebird 5 from legacy versions such as 2.5, 3.0, and 4.0.

It encapsulates a wealth of pragmatic advice, troubleshooting methodologies, and resolution techniques for common migration challenges. Despite its brevity (40 pages), the guide comprehensively addresses critical aspects of the migration process, including installation protocols, configuration optimization, user account migration, and data type transition strategies.

Read “Practical Migration Guide to Firebird 5.0” or download it in printable PDF format.

From www.firebirdsql.org

Note from the submitter: For those upgrading to Firebird 5, this practical guide can be considered an “add-on” for my (+200 pages) Migration Guide to Firebird 4 eBook, which contains detailed and very important information specially for those moving from FB 3 (or older versions).

The Backend Ring – 2024/Q1 (Adriano Fernandes)

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The Backend Ring is a challenge whose main objective is to share knowledge in the form of a challenge! This is the second edition.

Adriano Santos Fernandes, one of the Firebird Core Developers, published an article about his participation in the 2024/Q1 Backend Ring edition, where he submitted solutions using Firebird, PostgreSQLand LMDB. Here is an excerpt from the article translated to English:

“Today, March 10, 2024, is the deadline for project submissions for the Backend Ring – 2024/Q1, which is the second edition of the Backend Ring. In summary, it was necessary to deliver a project that simulates a banking service with a statement and creation of transactions concurrently, where accounts can never go negative below each customer’s limit. In addition, it was necessary to run in docker, with a load balancer distributing the load to at least two API services, and all services together could use a maximum of 1.5 CPU units and 550MB of memory.

I did not participate in the first edition in 2023 because I only found out after it ended.

After this first edition of the Backend Ring, there was a Compilers Ring (and interpreters) where I was able to participate and my project ranked 9th.”

FBPC 1.0.2 is released

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The new version of Performance Comparer for Firebird is available. In this new version, the parsing of huge trace files is much faster, along with some other small changes and fixes which are listed in the changelog.txt. This is the first non-beta version.

FBPC is a free tool that can help people to compare the performance between two Firebird versions, or even between the same Firebird version but with different configurations in firebird.conf

Why now is the best time to become a sponsor of Firebird Foundation?

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Pasted from FirebirdSQL:

Firebird is a powerful, open source, relational database that has been serving the needs of thousands of users and developers for over 20 years. Firebird is free to use and distribute, thanks to the generous support of the Firebird Foundation and its sponsors.

But Firebird needs your help to continue its development and innovation. By becoming a sponsor of the Firebird Foundation, you can contribute to the future of Firebird and ensure its quality, security, and performance.

Do you want to have a say in the future of Firebird? As a sponsor of the Firebird Foundation, you can be part of the Technical Task Group and help shape the direction and plans for the next versions of Firebird.

Right now, the Firebird developers are working on the plan for version 6 and beyond, and they would love to hear your ideas and feedback. This is a perfect time to join the discussion and make a difference.

You can become a sponsor of the Firebird Foundation with a Bronze plan, which costs only USD 900 per year. There are also other plans with more benefits and perks.

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the Firebird Foundation, please email Alexey Kovyazin, the President of the Firebird Foundation, at ak@firebirdsql.org. He will be happy to answer your questions and guide you through the process.

FirebirdSQL

FBPC 1.0.1 is released

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The new (beta) release of the Performance Comparer for Firebird tool fixes some small glitches and improves the usability. The Firebird Embedded used by the tool was also updated to the official Firebird 5.0 release. More details about the changes can be found in the ChangeLog.txt.

A video (recorded from a recent Live, in Portuguese) is now available on YouTube, showing how to use the tool. Of course, the previous instructions (in English) are still included in the distribution.

Download the new version and get to know how your queries will behave in Firebird 5 (or any version of Firebird), before migrating your customers.

Firebird 5.0 is released

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Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 5.0 — the latest major release of the Firebird relational database for Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android platforms.

This release introduces improvements in areas of performance, multithreaded processing (including backup, restore, sweep), SQL queries profiling, with better scalability and numerous enhancements in SQL language.

Please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. The complete Language Reference is also available.

Binary kits for all supported platforms are immediately available for download.

Note: Migrating to Firebird 5 from older versions needs attention to avoid bad surprises, especially for people still using versions older than Firebird 4. For those people, I fully recommend reading my Migration Guide to Firebird 4. Although it was written with FB 4 in mind, the steps and considerations are the same when moving to Firebird 5. Carlos H. Cantu

Firebird 5.0 Release Candidate 2 is available for testing

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Firebird Project announces the second Release Candidate of Firebird 5.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing on all supported platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android).

This Release Candidate demonstrates the complete set of features and improvements developed for the new release. Release Candidates are generally considered stable enough and may be recommended for testing in “almost-production” environments. Our users are appreciated giving it a try and providing feedback to the development mailing list. Apparent bugs can be reported directly to the bugtracker.

Please read the Release Notes carefully before installing and testing this Release Candidate.

Firebird 5 estimated release date

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For those wondering when Firebird 5 will be officially released: the core developers plan to release one more Release Candidate (RC2) next week, containing several fixes for bugs found after RC1 was publicly released.

The Firebird 5 final version should arrive in the end of December or early January!

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.

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