Firebird related news
From Jiri’s blog
Remember the challenge I did some time ago with .NET provider for Firebird and MonoTouch? Well because I’ve got access to previews of MonoDroid, why not to try the same here?
Some Firebird Tricks for today
I’m a webmaster amongst other things for a significant web hosting provider.
I wanted to share some code and tricks I come across to pretend I’m knowledgeable, remember to not forget what I’ve learned and because I’m a little jealous of my colleague’s awesome blog.
Some people doesn’t know, but anyone registered in the Firebird Tracker (registration is open, quick and free) can ask for improvements, report bugs, or vote in some existing tickets to raise their “priority”.
It is true that a high ranked ticket may never be implemented/solved. It is also true that the FB developers are free to implement what they want, without following any specific order or wishes. In fact, a ticket can be left untouched for a long time, if none of the developers feel inclined to work on that issue. But it is also true that having the users community voting for items, may sign to the Core Team developers with a direction to follow.
Here is a list of the top 10 ranked tickets at the moment:
Note that the top 10 issues are not bugs (the FB Core Team is a very efficient bug killer 😉 ), but enhancements/improvements to Firebird.
It seems that 775 and 657 are expected to be solved in Firebird 3. Core 773 and 2530 are related to the Firebird wire protocol.
Sadly, the top voted item (2530) is still unassigned. If you ever tried to use Firebird over the Internet and felt it is too slow, this is the issue you need to vote 😉 This improvement requires a new wire protocol, and changes to the API that would break the currently third-party access components. So, not easy task, but I hope to see it implemented in the future.
According to ohloh widget calculator the project is worth $ 671,246,615
“This calculator estimates how much it would cost to hire a team to write this project from scratch.”
You can help promoting firebird by using the widget to your site and clicking “I Use this” button
Michael Hieke wrote on flamerobin-devel list :
I have posted SVN revision 2048 (nice round number) snapshot files for
Windows 32 and 64 bits, both setup and ZIP files.
Enjoy, and please be sure to report any bugs, regressions or suggestions.
From the download statistics we can observe that Firebird will hit 1 Million downloads for this year pretty soon (a few days)
It’s hard to translate the sentence but the main idea is in Autumn you get all the rewards for a full year work (if you work in agriculture)
The article is in Romanian and is on one of the best portals for Free Software (Translated Be Free)
You can try reading using the google translate.
From Sergey Mereutsa (posted to fb-devel):
Dear friends!
While it is an offtopic here, but it may be interesting for all, who is in any form involved in Firebird development.
Several years ago, we announced a web-based game, written in Firebird SQL. It was DQ:Empires and a lot of peoples around the world played this game.
Now, I`m pleased to announce next game, in the same game universe, but slightly other – Delta Quadrant: Horizons, a web-based space 4X strategy.
I will not write much details here about the game (someone compared it with online version of Masters of Orion game, but it is not MOO2 clone) – you can read more on game`s site, http://www.dqhorizons.com/ .
Some technical details:
Have you ever lost microseconds when working with the type TIME?
Definitely, if you have ever tried to use them. In the previous versions of IBProvider, time was stored in OLE DB structure of DBTYPE_DBTIME type that does not support fractions of a second.
In the new IBProvider version, time data types have been improved. The new properties dbtime_rules and dbtimestamp_rules allow to set time storage not only in DBTIME/DBTIMESTAMP but also in WSTR and in the new type of MS SQL 2008 – DBTIME2 without losing milliseconds.
Please, read more and download new IBProvider Professional right now: Download Firebird OLE DB driver.
