Firebird Case Studies

Hello All Firebirders!

Today we start very important activityĀ  – building Firebird Case Studies catalog.

WHAT IS CASE STUDY?

Case study is an example of real-world implementation of certain product.
Case study should be very specific and describe:

  1. Technical details (database size, # of users, transactions load),
  2. Type of business (ERP, hospital automations, CD catalogs, web-sites examples, etc) and
  3. Business value ā€“ license costs economy, performance increasing, etc.

WHY FIREBIRD PROJECT NEEDS YOUR CASE STUDIES?

Can Firebird gain against MySQL?

From Marco Cantu’s blog:

Now, this could be a very good opportunity for all of the other open source database servers (and also some of paid ones!), particularly the most popular ones like Firebird and PostgreSQL. I’m particularly fond of Firebird (the InterBase offspring) and use it in many projects and did a lot of consulting to Delphi developers using it. Can this be the rise of Firebird? MySQL with its huge popularity has certainly obscured it, so it could be a good time to act.

Morfik 3 released – now free to everyone

Morfik is used to easily develop rich Internet applications that can be run also in devices, like the iPhone. They just released the version 3 of the product, with some interesting news:

NO MORE PAY TO PLAY

With this release, we have changed the game, significantly. Now you donā€™t have to pay to play the game! Thatā€™s right,Ā  Morfik 3 AppsBuilder is no longer licensed. It is accessible to everyone – at no cost.

Download Morfik 3 now!

There is no catch. We are serious about enabling developers to take full advantage of the power of the Web. This is about making it as easy as possible for all to discover, use and be successful with Morfik. We want to build the community of active users, which will ultimately help you get the most out of your Morfik development environment.

I remember Morfik having a “free” version in the past, and after some time, they changed their minds and started to offer only paid/licensed versions. I hope this time they are serious about the “there is no catch” thing.

Morfik uses Firebird as its default database.

Procedure to rebuild all indexes

After reading news about rebuilding Firebird indexes, I wrote a procedure for Windows, which allows fully automatic rebuild all indexes in the Firebird database. The procedure is described on my website http://gskoczylas.rekord.pl/Firebird/AutoReindexAll.php (in Polish). Automatic translation into English is here: http://goo.gl/9Uu96.

At the end of the web page there is a link which allows to download the complete procedure. Procedure has been tested on Windows Vista with Firebird 2.5.


Regards,

Grzegorz Skoczylas
gskoczylas@gmail.com

Rebuilding a Firebird index

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 activeĀ  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

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.

Wanna transaction in MySQL? Ok, pay now, or go to Firebird.

Looks like Oracle decided to charge money for those who wants to use InnoDB with MySQL. InnoDB offers features like transaction control, not found in the “classic” version of MySQL. Read moreĀ  here and here.

Need Transactions, Stored Procedures, Triggers, etc. and don’t wanna to pay? GO FIREBIRD!

Update: As pointed by some of our readers, InnoDB is still offered for free in the MySQL “Community” edition.

1 28 29 30 31 32 100