Database Archives - Firebird News

Are your data access components ready for Firebird 3?

June 7, 2011 Andrew Merkulov Leave a comment

We are continuing to actively add new functionality of Firebird 3 DBMS to IBProvider.

Let us remind you that already 2 months ago we added support of BOOLEAN data type from Firebird 3. In the new version of IBProvider Professional, we added support of PACKAGE instruction.

Now you can put in order a bulk of database procedures and functions and group them by sense into individual modules (PACKAGE). This arrangement will substantially simplify understanding and maintenance of SQL code.

Ream more about Firebird 3 access improvements.

IBProvider for Firebird and Interbase has been released.

January 14, 2009 Andrew Merkulov Leave a comment

Changes in IBProvider v2 (build 2.6.06.2688)

Addition of UTF-8 charset support
Loading of charset information for COLUMN and PROCEDURE_PARAMETERS metadata schemes from system tables.

Changes in IBProvider v3 (build 3.0.0.6327 RC3)

New IBProvider v3 offers the brand new method for working with text data charsets:

We added ctype_user property that allows setting the encoding of data coming to client irrespective of the encoding in which this data is coming from database server.
New algorithms of BLOB fields converting provide for quick work with flowing data, optimization of interaction with ICU library.
We added ctype_none property that allows setting the charset for working with text data in NONE encoding.
Other important changes.
Support of Firebird and Interbase charsets aliases.

See detailed information on working with new character set processor in Firebird and Interbase character sets.

Text columns size in Firebird 2.X

IBProvider started to control text columns size when working with Firebird 2 servers in Unicode mode. If the length of loaded data exceeds the text column size the exclusion will be generated.

In the new edition of IBProvider Professional 7 codepages support was implemented, bugs were fixed, BLOB-fields access and memory management was improved

October 5, 2008 Andrew Merkulov Leave a comment

IBProvider v3 Release Candidate 3

Support of the following codepages added: DOS858, TIS620, BIG5, KSC_5601, GB_2312, SJIS_0208, EUCJ_0208;
Bug in the errors handling for OUT-parameters of query was fixed;
BLOB-fields access was improved;
Memory management was improved;

IBProvider v2/v1

BLOB-fields access was improved;
Memory management was improved;

Source: Interbase and Firebird driver site

Multi-file Database ?

September 14, 2008 mariuz Leave a comment

Some last database repair cases we did were with multi-file databases. Interesting, that latest InterBase and Firebird versions was used, and also file system for the storage was NTFS, not FAT32 and FAT16. But, the databases was created and maintained using 1 gigabyte files.

[ED: seems that is better to put the database on an good file system and in an single file ]

[See remaining text…]

Well, maybe XP and Vista can copy 3gb files from FAT32 to NTFS, but multi-file databases have several disadvantages, that does not depend on file system:

some people think that multi-file database will have better performance than single-file database, on multi-processor/core computers and using InterBase SMP or Firebird Classic. This is wrong. Server does not do any “parallel” access to the secondary files. It treats multi-file database as one sequential file broken into parts. So, if table pages spreaded in several database files, table scan will scan these files one by one.
Multi-file databases have hard-links to the secondary files inside it, and it is impossible to move such a database from one logical disk to another (for example, from d: to e:). If you want to do this, you need to make backup and restore, or get hex-editor and hack this hardcoded drive letter and path in the header pages of the mult-file database. Single-file databases does not have this problem at all.
You need to watch over mult-file database’s size, and from time to time, while database is groving, create additional secondary file with appropriate size. We’ve seen lot of databases with first files having some equal size, and the last file larger than other – DBA forgot to create additional secondary file at right time.
Secondary file size can be specified in 2 ways. Using STARTING AT, when you specify from what page number server will continue database in the next file, and using LENGTH, where you specify secondary file size in pages. The best way is to use LENGTH parameter for all files of the multi-tile database, including primary file and secondary files. But if you will start to mix STARTING AT and LENGTH you can loose understanding what size secondary files will have, and get multi-file database with different file sizes.
Backup and restore automated scripts must be updated from time to time to include additional secondary file, because there is no command-line parameters for gbak that could do automated restore of the database to create unknown number of secondary files. Each secondary file and it’s size must be specified at the command line.
This is really a headache for the DBA.

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New packages of IBProvider Professional Edition came out

July 30, 2008 Andrew Merkulov Leave a comment

IBProvider v3 Release Candidate 3 [build 3.0.0.4963]

NUMERIC-types support was improved.
Disabled metadata cache mode performance was increased in 2.5 times.
Metadata schemes were updated. Among them in schemes TABLE_INFO and TABLES classification of external (EXTERNAL TABLE) and temporary tables (GLOBAL TEMPORARY PRESERVE/DELETE) was added starting from Firebird 2.1 and Interbase 7.5.
Correct processing of active transactions in the connection pool.

New build IBProvider v1.9.9.2547 and IBProvider v2.6.3.2547

BLOB-columns metadata description bug was fixed.
Correct processing of active transactions in the connection pool.

Details on the Firebird driver site.