Firebird and Alfresco CMS

Posted by: “maximshiryaev” MaximShiryaev.at.mail.ru
Date: Wed Sep 27, 2006 4:24 am (PDT)

Hello.

Some time ago I’ve been evaluating Alfresco – an opensource CMS. Its stack is this: MySQL -> Hibernate -> SpringFramework -> tomcat -> Web interface.

Since all other systems in our company use Firebird as a database back-end I’ve decided to move Alfresco to Firebird.

Here are the steps:

• install FB2.0RC SS (Win32)
• add JayBird jar to appropriate location
• change connection string params in Alfresco xml configuration files
• change Hibernate SQL dialect to FirebirdDialect in its properties files

That’s all. Hibernate creates all the required tables, etc.

Time required is about 30 min on a clean database (without porting existing records).

FB1.x cannot be used because of index size limits – it cannot handle
char-enocded GUIDs (a pair of them in one index) if the database is UTF8.

A for performance, I cannot say for sure, because we’ve just evaluated a product without heavy load. But at the first glance FB is slightly faster.

Maxim.