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Milan Babuskov
Education:
2001 - B.Sc. In Business Information System Engineering
2003 - M.Sc. In Internet Technology at University of Belgrade
Started to program as a 14 year old, making simple games in BASIC and later assembler on Motorola's 680x0 series CPUs. Programmed in C, Perl and Java. Now writing the code in C++ and PHP.
Started to work with Informix at University, after few experiments with Paradox, MySQL and MSSQL, finally switched to Firebird. Starting from 2002, developing various software using Firebird, PHP and Apache.
Developer of open source FBExport and FBCopy tools, for manipulation of data in Firebird databases. In 2003, started a project to build a lightweight cross-platform graphical administration tool for Firebird. The project was later named FlameRobin, and is built entirely with open source tools and libraries.
Hobbies include playing basketball and writing cross-platform computer games, some of them very popular (Njam has over 36000 downloads on sf.net):
Born in 1977. Still single (that should change before the conference though). Live and work in Subotica, Serbia. Currently employed at large ISP company.
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Managing Metadata Changes
Development of database applications involves three distinct activities: changing the database schema, updating the data in the database and changing the code that uses the database. The last one is easy to manage: we have version control software for source code, and many ways to distribute executables to customers.
However, during development we all face the problem of managing the database metadata in development and production systems. In development systems many developers can work on their own (sandbox) versions of database, and apply their changes to the master database. When a new version is ready for release, changes have to be applied to the customer's database.
This session covers various ways to do that job, and also presents a way to manage the databases the same way we manage the source code (version control). It also demonstrates Firebird-based open source tools that are used to automate this process. These tools enable developers to work separately of each other, and get in sync once they decide so. A developer can even work at customer's site, make the changes in application or database structure, and easily migrate those back into development database once he returns back to the office.
Developing Cross-Platform Applications with Firebird and wxWidgets
This session presents open source libraries and tools that enable developers who use Firebird to create cross-platform desktop GUI applications using C++ with the open source (and free) wxWidgets library, which offers native look and feel on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.
The session shows what can be done with it, and how to do it efficiently. Important cross-platform development issues will be discussed: things that are abstracted by wxWidgets, and those that are not.
For access to Firebird, IBPP is chosen as it offers access to all Firebird features as simple C++ wrapper around Firebird's C API. The session shows how to integrate IBPP with wxWidgets, and also gives few C++ classes that can be readily used (a Grid class, for example).
A set of tools commonly used in development of wxWidgets applications will be presented, and their advantages and flaws discussed. wxWidgets will be compared with other available libraries, and also with Delphi.
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Carlos Cantu
Carlos H. Cantu maintains a major Firebird Brazilian dedicated portal (www.firebase.com.br). He is the author of "Firebird Essencial" book and one of the owners of the DB FreeMagazine (www.dbfreemagazine.com.br). He had written more than 30 Firebird articles for Delphi and DB related brazilian magazines, is the president of DUG-BR (Delphi Users Group Brazil) and is the organizer of the Firebird Developers Day conference (www.FirebirdDevelopersDay.com.br)
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New Shutdown Modes and Backups in Firebird 2.0
Firebird 2.0 brings new modes to put a database in a shutdown state. For the first time, we can be sure that the database will not accept connections, even from the SYSDBA, if we require that.
The new nBackup utility allows the possibility of doing incremental backups in Firebird. Now users can create good backup schedules using third party tools or even standard SO utilites (like cron on linux, or scheduler on windows).
In this talk Carlos presents the new shutdown modes and all the supported ways of doing backups (gbak, api, nbackup), along with an introduction to some third party backup utilities.
Updating Database Structures
For those who have several customers sharing the same application, a means to keep databases structures up to date is essential to make sure that the database and the application are in sync. This talk will provide one example, using Delphi, of implementing a way to update database structures automatically up to the most recent level required to run that application, by way of SQL scripts. Some cautions regarding connected users, transactions and possible crashes during the metadata update will be discussed as well.
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Pavel Cisar
Pavel has worked in various IT fields for about 20 years. During his career, he has worked on (too) many different projects, from operating system implementation, to automation of technology processes, to games, to various ERP systems.
For many years, his preferred programming language was Pascal but, in the last few years, he has been moving more and more toward Python.
Thanks to Pavel's public activities around Delphi, InterBase and Open Source, he eventually got a job at the Czech branch of Borland, where he worked from 1999-2001 as a tech. support engineer for Delphi, Kylix and InterBase. He left Borland to continue his deep involvement with the Firebird Project and, in the Autumn of 2001, joined IBPhoenix. Additionally, he is responsible for developing the QA procedures and test suites for Firebird, work which is assisted by regular grants from the Firebird Foundation.
Pavel is a regular speaker at Delphi and database-related conferences and events in Czech Republic. He wrote a book in Czech about Firebird and InterBase, and is the author of many articles about Firebird and databases in general for various magazines.
Pavel lives here in Prague. He is married with two children (girl and boy). In his free time, he enjoys family life and reading sci-fi books.
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Making your own Firebird PowerTools with Python
Level: Beginner
There are many powerful Firebird administration tools out there, but they all have one thing in common: They are point and click oriented. While GUI tools are great for beginners and for certain tasks, they fall short when you need to perform more complex, not so common or batch-oriented tasks. Some users know that many such tasks could be handled by the dated, yet still useful QLI tool. But QLI is neither actively maintained or well documented, and also has its weaknesses. This session will show you how the Python programming language was used to build a brand new "QLI on steroids", and how you can use it and extend it.
- Why GUI tools are not so great, and when CLI tools shine.
- Why Python was the best choice for PowerTools development.
- PowerTools architecture and implementation.
- How to use PowerTools.
- How you can extend PowerTools.
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Bjoern Reimer
Björn works as DBA at the RRZE at the University of
Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and as an independent software developer building applications for small engineering companies. He has worked with Firebird since the first release on Windows, Solaris and Linux.
Dirk Baumeister
Dirk Baumeister is working as Diplom-Wirtschaftsinformatiker at
the Language Centre of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, organising all coursework and placement tests for the Center
using a Firebird database Delphi and Linux and applications.
As an independent software developer, his first contacts with Firebird date back to times long past when dbase applications always were
killed by concurrent users.
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Full text search in Firebird without a full text search engine
A technique using blobs for text and a trigger-based, self-maintaining structure for building word indices - but only for words which are actually searched for. It?s a minimalist and 'simple approach, its performance might not be the best, but it works!
Firebird clients and system tables
Implementation of clients for the Web and Windows, which do only depend on database structures, including
- Checking authorization for presentation of table controls
- Stored procedure to ensure you can sail round a gbak bug
- Logically linking table and generator and a mechanism (stored procedure) to maintain them.
- Formatting data from tables with stored procedures for simplifying client software
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Lucas Franzen
University: Study of Sociology and Poltiical Science,
programming since 1990, Unix-systems. Working with Delphi from the mid nineties on (starting with Delphi 1 and IB4.0),
own company since 2001, developing and programming of logistics software (transport & export of goods, freiight calculations, etc.).
Firebird Foundation member since the very beginning and recognised as a highly fitting auctioneer for the famous Mad Auction.
Living in Freiburg, Black Forest (Germany), married, two boys (8 and almost 6 years old).
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Mad Auction
Traditional "bridal auction" whereby the Firebird Foundation collects goodies from donors and, using fair means and foul, uses them to help you to part with your money.
It's all for a good cause, though!
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Ann Harrison
Ann Harrison has worked on databases for longer than she cares to admit, starting at Digital Equipment Corporation where she led a CODASYL database project for the PDP-ll, generally known as the "elephant on a bicycle". She also designed a data dictionary based on the semantic data model and created a prototype using Rdb/ELN.
After DEC, Ann worked briefly on another CODASYL database, then joined Interbase in 1985. Since then, she has followed the evolution of InterBase and followed Jim around the software industry.
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Transportable Firebird Databases
You can copy some databases from system to system, if you shut the database down before copying it. Why does Firebird insist on a backup and restore when moving databases between systems like Solaris and Windows?
The answer is neither ignorance nor convenience, but performance.
The first part of this talk examines the reasons behind the decision to match the Firebird database structure to the hardware architecture it runs on. Issues covered include the differences between data representation on different operating systems and hardware architectures, the relative complexity of the Firebird database structure, and tradeoffs other database systems make to allow copying.
It can be made possible to allow Firebird databases to be safely copied between some operating systems that have different data representations. The second part of the talk describes the changes necessary to the Firebird code base and their implications for "local" and "foreign" databases.
Topics include the transformation of system and user data, internal structural information, indexes, and a mechanism for recognizing whether a "foreign" database can be accessed safely.
This talk presupposes some understanding of database internals.
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Fikret Hasovic
Started working with Delphi in 1995 (at University, department for mathematics). First commercial work was in 1997, working as a VB programmer and using Informix as DB backend. In 1998 he moved to new company, SoftGroup d.o.o., where he has worked on the development of various projects using Delphi, Paradox and InterBase.
In 2001 worked for Zrcalo d.o.o. (Slovenian software company) on Banking software development. After 3 months joined USAID Parsons project (Parsons Delaware Inc), developing a complete IT system solution using Delphi and InterBase 6.0.
In 2002 back in Softgroup d.o.o. where he worked on new design for business information systems.
In mid 2002 joined USAID TAMP Project (Development Alternatives, Inc.), working as Senior Programmer and Computer Systems Engineer on design and development of Tax system software for Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are using n-tier concepts (AstaIO and then migrated to kbmMW), creating client applications using Delphi and kbmMW Application Servers (Delphi based) connecting to Firebird 1.5.2 CS on SuSE linux. He migrated these AppServers and LoadBalancing Servers to Linux using Kylix. Client applications connect to AppServers using Wireless connections (we cover the complete country with that system).
Recently he published an article about Firebird in Bosnian IT magazine INFO (www.info.ba), and wrote a Delphi 2005 article (that will be published in next issue). He is a contributor to OpenSource project JediVCS (Version Control System based on FreeVCS sources), and has also developed the collation driver for Bosnian language (Win1250 charset, Collation name BS_BA) (Firebird 2) commited to CVS few weeks ago by Adriano. He is also a member of Firebird Foundation Committee.
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Cross-Platform Development Using Lazarus
Current state of the open source free pascal compiler (FPC) and assiciated Lazarus IDE.
The second part of session will focus on the migration of existing Delphi (and Kylix) projects to FPC with special focus on database programs using Firebird.
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Stefan Heymann
Stefan Heymann is founder and manager of Consic Software Engineering in Germany. He has more than 20 years of experience in the development of database, network and web applications with Turbo/Borland Pascal and Delphi and is the author of the destructor.de Open Source XML parser. He has been a speaker on topics like XML, Delphi and InterBase/Firebird for a few years.
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Character Sets and Unicode in Firebird
This session will show you how non-ASCII text and text from different languages and scripts can be handled with Firebird. It will introduce you to the Firebird world of Character Sets, Collations, Unicode, case insensitive searching and Client character sets.
We will take a look at how international text influences the design of your database and the client programming. The session will also discuss the various new international features of Firebird 2.0.
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Vladislav Horsun
Vlad studied in the Faculty of Applied Mathematics at Dniepropetrovsk State University and received his Diploma in 1996. He has been in love with C++ since his second course, so his first C++ program was written sometime in 1992. He had been working with Borland products from 1991-on and remembers Turbo Pascal 5.0, Turbo C++ 1.0, Turbo Prolog and Turbo Assember as well. He worked with Delphi since its beginning and confesses that he hates Visual Basic!
Vlad's initial database experience happened at university (FoxPro 2.x). InterBase (v.5.1) came into his life around 1997. He started using Firebird when it reached some stability during the v0.9.x betas.
Vlad joined the Firebird development team in 2003 and soon established himself as a highly valuable core developer. His work is assisted by regular grants from the Firebird Foundation.
Vlad lives in Dneipropetrovsk with his wife and their small son.
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New SQL Features in Coming Versions of Firebird
Firebird already supports a rich subset of the SQL language. For future versions of Firebird (after version 2.0) the Firebird team has already implemented some interesting new language features. Here we will examine when and how they can be helpful for application programmers.
We'll learn new syntax and look at examples of how these new features can be used to make database applications easier to write, understand and maintain and how they can make applications run faster.
The new SQL features include
- Global Temporary Tables
- Common Table Expressions
- INSERT ... RETURNING and UPDATE ... RETURNING statements
The new REPLACE statement will be included if it is ready in time for the conference. If there is time, I will also cover some of the more interesting new language features in Firebird 2.0: the EXECUTE BLOCK statement, default parameters in stored procedures and explicit cursors in PSQL
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Holger Klemt
Holger Klemt is known to many Firebird, InterBase and Delphi developers as the author of a book about the SQL database InterBase, published by bhv, and also from the lectures he has held at the American and German Borland/Inprise Developer Conferences. As part of the long standing cooperation with Borland, he has carried out various roadshows and events for Firebird, InterBase, Delphi and Delphi/400 throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Holger Klemt founded HK-Software in 1991. Since then the company has been operating in Development, Support, Training/Coaching and Programming. One of the products from HK-Software is the IBExpert, which is a professional Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the development and administration of InterBase and Firebird databases.
HK-Software was the organizer of the international Firebird conferences in 2003 and 2004. This year, Holger and the HK-Software team are again responsible for the conference technology and many preparation tasks like the printed materials, conference packs, CD burning and more.
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Creating Transaction Logs in Firebird
Firebird has a very powerful internal command set. Triggers can be used
to add a simple internal transction log. In this session, you will see
how to create a transaction log based on triggers. These triggers are
created with stored procedures and can be activated and deactivated with
a simple call of these procedure. The transaction log is saved in a
table and the data can be used for bidirectional online or offline
replication, database clustering, time based backup/restore etc.
Creating modern database webapplications using Firebird, php and AJAX
There are many different ways to create modern looking database
web applications. In this session we will show you the basic differences
between AJAX and non-AJAX website programming and how this affects the
user.
Using the IBExpertWebForms technology as a basis, you will see how easy it
is to create database web applications in front of Firebird databases
without writing a single line of Javascript or html. All Events and
Procedures are written in Firebird stored procedures and the GUI is
designed visually.
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Dmitri Kouzmenko
Started to work with computers using home-made based on Z8080 processor in 1986. Up to 1991 learned assembler, Basic, Turbo Pascal, MUMPS, Prolog and some other less common programming languages.
Most interested in database access methods, database programming and modeling. In 1994 started to work with InterBase and, within 3 years, established a name as an InterBase consultant in Russia.
To the present, organizes Firebird and InterBase training and a website for InterBase users.
In 2002 created his own company, iBase.ru, that is focused
on supporting people for all InterBase, Firebird and Yaffil
versions. Initiated Yaffil to be a saleable product
in Russia.
Author of many articles about Firebird's MGA, transactions and other internal specifics and of the IBAnalyst tools.
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Database Health and Corruption
This session will cover theoretical and practical things about database maintenance and repair: how to choose a backup/restore strategy for particular system, what will be the best storage and RAID, how a database can became corrupted, worst backup and corruption cases, tools to repair a database, and finally, how to make a database 100% restorable.
Optimizing Server Performance
Tuning of Firebird, operating system (Windows, Linux) and hardware. Real cases of performance optimization, monitoring server and applications, details about IBDeveloper Magazine TPC-R and TPC-C tests.
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Mauricio Longo
Started working full-time in 1992 in software development using Turbo Pascal and BTrieve. At that time worked on Hotel automation software. From 1992 to 1994 he specialized in doveloping information systems for Windows using Turbo Pascal for Windows, Visual Basic and Powerbuilder with Microsoft SQL Server. In 1994 he took my first Microsoft Certification Examination - Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
From 1994 to 1997 worked as Software Development and Technology Manager for a small consulting company - 18 person tech team - and obtained the Microsoft Certified Product Specialist, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, Microsoft Certified Trainer and Borland Certified Delphi Client/Server Developer (Delphi 2) Certifications.
In 1996 he published his first book (co-authored with a good friend) about software development with Delphi 2. In the years to come he would publish nine other books co-authored with the same friend - Ronaldo Smith - and two more on my own. The books covered mainly different aspects of appliction development with Delphi as well as Windows NT 4, Windows 98, Windows XP and Internet Explorer.
In 1997 Mauricio joined TBA - the largest Microsoft Solution Provider company in Latin America at the time - as a Senior Technical Consultant and immediately went to work in a project in one of Latin America's largest Banks (Brazilian governament owned - Caixa Economica Federal). At this company he worked first in Technical Support to Microsoft SQL Server and then as a lead Solutions Architect in a project that involed 67 people and that resulted in one of the World's largest Business-to-Business initatives, integrating over 1 million companies.
From 2001 to 2003 he published a PDF generating Word Processing shareware application, which was developed as a Hobby. In 2001 he joined one of the largest datacenter companies in Brazil - .comDominio - as Technical Support Manager and ended up working mostly in technical pre-sales. In 2002 he switched jobs to my current occupation - Infrastructure Manager as Webb Negócios, the lead service/solution provider for business integration and supply chain optimization in Latin America. At Webb he is responsible for networking planning and administration, hardware and software and specification and acquisition, telecomunications, Database Management and help-desk. He is currently responsible for ten sites in four countries, including two external datacenter sites and an internal one totaling 48 servers and over 370 users.
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Supporting Complex On Line Systems with Satellite Databases
Maintaining performance levels of complex on line systems, with a rapidly growing user base, is a tough challenge to meet. Often it becomes necessary to enforce
restrictions on the quantity and frequency of retrieval requests to avoid uneconomic operations that consume an unfair share of processing resources. An inconvenient
side-effect of such restrictions is that some types of essential, data-access intensive operations become impossible without considerable redesign.
A concept worth considering, for its relatively low cost and impact is the Satellite Database Server. Satellite Servers create conditions for the execution of long running
queries for Business Intelligence applications and for the usage of complex filtering, without hindering the performance of a system's central data store.
This session will discuss the conceptual usage of Satellite Database Servers with very large corporate databases and as an extension to the data stores of on-line
application service providers, focusing on practical applications.
Application Development with Morfik WebOS and Firebird
Mauricio will provide a general overview of the Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder toolset; its architecture and its incorporation of Firebird as its built-in database. The main goal is to introduce and demo a new and powerful tool for the creation of AJAX-based web, desktop and corporate applications that use Firebird as their core database.
Session will include a live demonstration of all the main database-related functionalities of the Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder. Database and table creation, structural change and data input will be covered. The demo will include creation of data-aware application interfaces and reports that plug directly into a Firebird database.
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Andrew Morgan
Andrew Morgan received his BSc Mechanical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa in 1990 with a strong background in numerical analysis and programming.
Andrew has 10 years experience writing primarily in Turbo/Object Pascal, 10 years primarily in C++, 10 years in SQL and 20 years in Assembler.
He subsequently concentrated on technical/numerical database systems using Sybase, SQL Server, InterBase and Firebird. He has developed high performance assembler functions (FastMath.dll and FastMath.so) running for Firebird/XP and SuSE respectively.
Andrew has developed high performance template classes in C++ for complex numbers, vector and matrix manipulation, statistics, symbolic polynomial analysis, fourier analysis and data smoothing with differentiation. As a test case, he deployed Fourier.dll for Firebird/XP which was so successful that he has since completed Smooth.dll for Firebird/XP.
Andrew Morgan lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with his wife and three boys.
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Towards a Universal UDF Testing Framework
Andrew presents a framework built around a CheckUDF database whose purposes are to register all functions of interest with the database, to store all input/output test cases (allowing new cases to be built as required) and to automatically check each of the functions to test whether the given input arguments do in fact produce the required output.
A system for implementing Transition Constraints
The purpose of transition constraints is to control the allowable changes in state of a record. As an example, an invoice may have a foreign key to a status table. Referential integrity will enforce that all invoices have a valid status, however it cannot control the validity of changes from one status to another. Supposing the complete transition list is: new -> picked, picked -> printed, printed -> delivered, printed -> collected, delivered -> paid and collected -> paid. Issues arise: one should not be able to create a paid invoice; an invoice cannot be picked after it is collected; after an invoice has been printed one should not be able to edit or delete it. These are often complex bits of logic which are built into applications, but all of these can be controlled very easily within the database itself.
Andrew will demonstrate how both coarsely and finely grained transition control rules can be implemented using just three tables, triggers and three stored procedures.
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Ivan Prenosil
After finishing university studies in Electronics, Ivan developed microcomputer hardware for controlling robotic manipulators and other devices. That was followed by
many years developing editorial systems and full-text databases for news agencies. For the past two years Ivan has been working for a company developing a
point-of-sale system for pharmacies.
Ivan started working with Delphi/InterBase 10 years ago, but has used other programming languages for much longer.
It should be noted that Ivan is is probably our most remote speaker, given that, unlike others who simply use the elevator to go from hotel room to conference room,
he needs to drive from his home on the opposite side of Prague. :-)
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Data Types in Practice/Optimizing Counts (Dual Topics)
Lots of people on our support newsgroups have problems like "Why do I get wrong results?" or "Why do I get this arithmetic exception error?", that all result from underestimating ones need to learn basic information about data types.
Because the main task of RDBMS systems is to store and retrieve data, good understanding of datatypes is essential for developers. I will talk about the basic properties of individual data types, how to write literals correctly and how to solve a number of common problems from the support lists (e.g. how to avoid numeric overflow when multiplying NUMERIC values).
Optimization is a huge topic, but I will talk about a single problem - why counting rows in FB is slow, and what developers can do about it. There are lots of methods for solving this problem, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. For each method I will show example with timings and statistics.
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Paul Reeves
No profile provided.
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Building Firebird on Windows and Linux
Building Firebird has never been particularly easy. This is partly
because Firebird is cross-platform and no-one, yet, has worked out the perfect way to maintain a cross-platform build process that works across systems as diverse as Windows, Linux and the Mac.
Each major release of Firebird has seen the project make a fresh attempt at solving this problem. This means that the build process for each version is slightly different. In some cases, even, this means that what you learnt to build one version of Firebird is redundant for the next.
In this session we shall look at how the Firebird build process has evolved and where it is going in the future. We'll go through the major components in the build process and how things hang together. We'll take a look at some of the challenges in keeping platform build processes in sync.
And, most importantly, we'll also look at what is involved in
successfully setting up your environment to build Firebird.
[ This session is not recommended for people beginning with Firebird. ]
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Roman Rokytskyy
Somewhere in the mid 1990s, Roman's girlfriend had to do a coursework assignment in databases...so Roman started to learn InterBase. In 2001 he joined David Jencks and Alejandro Alberola to create a pure-Java JCA/JDBC driver--the one that became JayBird.
Roman currently leads the JayBird subproject development and actively participates in the Firebird-Java list as a supremely patient supportmeister and chaser of bugs. He is a member of the Firebird Project admin team and an honorary member of the Foundation.
Roman received his diploma in Radio-Physics and Electronics in 1998, at around the same time he was completing an InterBase-based data warehouse for IP traffic monitoring in the university where he worked at that time. Then he started his post-graduate studies, with "distributed databases" as the initial topic for his thesis. Eventually it became "distributed systems", "group communication", "mobile agents", and more...
In 2002 he also joined the JavaGroups project, which is currently used as a clustering medium for JBoss application server. After two years he finally chose in favor of Firebird.
And his girlfriend, now his wife, sometimes says that she should have chosen another topic for her course work.
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Jaybird: new release, new features
In this presentation we will go through the new features that were introduced in Jaybird 2.x: services API, events, support for FB 2.0, improved support for XA transactions, showing their usage scenarios and discussing the existing limitations.
External routines: interfaces, usage and possibilities
This presentation will show the upcoming interfaces for external routines that can be invoked from DSQL and PSQL statements. We go through the life cycle of the external routine, discuss the possible implementations and we show the new possibilities: wrappers for autonomous transactions, remote procedure calls, access to remote data sources.
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Paul Ruizendaal
Paul Ruizendaal first got interested in Firebird/Interbase when he was looking for a capable, yet compact database engine for Phoenix Object Basic in the late 90's.
Suitably impressed with Firebird's features, speed and ease of use, he became the main driver behind the Fyracle project, which aims to bring the cost of porting major Oracle applications to Firebird down to manageable levels.
Paul is the CEO of Janus Software, a small software company dedicated to cross-platform tools and solutions for the mid-market. He is also a director of a large commodity trading business.
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Fyracle, Oracle-mode Firebird
The proprietary database market is increasingly dominated by just a few companies, with Oracle being the leading supplier. Prices have stayed very high, typically well over $10K, even as database management systems are becoming commodity software.
At the same time application vendors see few growth opportunities at the enterprise end of the market and are
turning their attention to mid-market accounts. Bloated, expensive database engines don't sell very well into this market.
Oracle-mode Firebird dramatically reduces the cost of porting
applications from Oracle to Firebird. It accepts Oracle style SQL
(joins with (+), system catalog, support for "connect by", etc.) and it supports PL/SQL stored procedures and triggers.
This talk explains what Firebird's Oracle-mode is all about and how advanced it is when compared to most other attempts.
Solution Stacks Built on Firebird and PHP - Another Flame in the LAMP?
Having a PHP-stack for Firebird is as important as having ODBC, JDBC and .Net drivers and as important as smooth integration with Delphi.
Four leading technologies dominate for building database-based solutions these days:
- VB/Delphi based
- Java based
- .Net based
- PHP/Web based ("LAMP", but that acronym misses the point)
All four seem to be growing. (1) may be getting dated, but is still
getting a lot of use; (2) is seeing lots of buzz around app servers
like JBoss; (3) is being pushed heavily by MS; and (4) is being pushed by big DB vendors, probably to combat threats from (2) and (3).
I will talk about solution stacks and why I think "LAMP" is a concept that has evolved into a paradigm, far beyond the specific set of "brand-name" components that gave it its acronymic name.
We will look at LAMP, Firebird-style, and explore stack solutions for building
- a mid-market Exchange/Notes replacement
- an "XML database"
- a web service
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Erick Sasse
Erick is from Brazil and is a member of Firebird Foundation. He has been a developer for more than 14 years, and has been using Firebird for all his database needs since its inception. His primary development tool is Delphi but he uses Firebird with several other tools and platforms like Kylix, .Net, PHP, Ruby, PalmOS, etc.
Erick has been a speaker at several conferences in Brazil like the Firebird Developers Day, Borland Conference, DUG meetings and others.
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Integration of Firebird with PalmOS Handhelds and Smartphones
This session will show how to synchronize your data in a Firebird database with PalmOS handhelds and smartphones and using 2-tier and 3-tier approaches. For 2-tier approach we'll be using Delphi and a set of open source components to create a conduit to hotsync your data through a desktop computer to the PDA. In the 3-tier approach we'll be using Delphi and Asta components to build the server application, and PocketStudio with Asta to build the PalmOS client application that runs on the PDA. And I also intend to show how to sync the data in batch mode and online mode with Firebird.
N-Tier applications with Firebird and RemObjects DataAbstract
This session will show how to access a Firebird database using an n-tier approach with RemObjects DataAbstract (RODA). RODA is a very powerful framework and I'll show how an application server with Firebird can provide data to clients created using Delphi Win32, WinForms 2.0 (Visual Studio 2005), ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows Mobile (smartphones and PDAs) using .NET Compact Framework. All clients connecting to the same server, sharing the same business rules. The server can be created using Delphi to run on Win32, Kylix, to run on Linux or .Net to run on Windows or Mono.
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Bill Oliver
Bill Oliver received his Computer Science degree from NC State in 1988, and his MBA from Duke University in 1995. He has nearly 20 years of experience in the software industry, primarily as a software engineer but also as a product manager and IT consultant. For the past three years, he has worked for SAS Institute, specializing in database and data storage development for Base SAS.
Gary Franklin
Gary Franklin received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Louisiana State University in 1980. He joined SAS in 1985, when the software product he helped develop, the SYSTEM 2000 Hierarchical Database Management System (DBMS), was purchased by SAS.
Since joining SAS, he has ported the SAS suite of products to several hardware platforms and developed portable storage and retrieval services for SAS data.
Gary currently resides in Austin, Texas, and is working on integrating Firebird Vulcan as a SAS data store.
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Delivering and Using the Vulcan Embedded Server as Part of the SAS System
Vulcan is being integrated into the SAS System as a transactional data store and will be delivered as an embedded server. As part of SAS, Vulcan must meet the delivery, quality, reliability and performance needs of an enterprise-class solution suite.
The goal of this paper is to describe the SAS customizations being made to Vulcan to meet these requirements. The customizations include changes to initialization processing, security, message and error handling, and thread-safe performance modifications.
Real World Applications Using Firebird
As part of our process of integrating Vulcan into the SAS System's enterprise-class data storage architecture, we've worked with several application teams who are migrating their products to be based on Firebird. This includes both internal SAS Solutions and third-party partners.
This paper describes lessons learned on the application side while migrating to a Firebird-based architecture. Included are descriptions of best practices for writing portable database applications, as well as forward-looking requests for features to add to Firebird that will make writing portable applications even easier.
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Dmitry Sibiryakov
Dmitry, a self-proclaimed programmer, was born in 1971 and started programming soon after. By the time he was old enough to go to school, he programmed in binary because he couldn't read source code.
He admits to being completely crazy and still single. He is a frequent contributor to the Firebird support lists and has a reputation for seeing clearly that which is obscure to everyone else.
For some time, Dmitry has been working with IBPhoenix as the developer and main support person for IBReplicator.
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Replicating with IBReplicator 2.5
An introduction to the various forms of database replication followed by a walk-through setting up and running various scenarios with IB Replicator 2.5 to meet a variety of requirements.
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Thomas Steinmaurer
Thomas Steinmaurer has used InterBase 4/5/6 and finally Firebird while working as a software developer alongside his computer science study, completed at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria) in 2001. He wrked then for four years for the Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) as a research assistant in the areas web-engineering and database technology.
Thomas joined the Software Competence Center Hagenberg (SCCH) in Sept 2005 as a software engineer and research assistant in the area of database technology and data warehouses. He is also responsible for the LogManager product line at Upscene Productions.
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Owner Migration, the Easy Way
Database objects and the database itself has an owner, namely
the creator, which is a regular Firebird user. Usually, people
use SYSDBA, especially Firebird newbies. Using SYSDBA as the
owner of the database and included database objects might strike
back when deploying the database to the customer or web hoster.
This session discusses what you should know about ownership
and their consequences for deployment. It also explains the
mechanism behind a freely available tool called FBOwnerMigrator
for migrating to another owner without recreating the database
from scratch.
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Alex Skvirski
Alex's computing activities began at the age of 12 when his father (mistakenly) lent him his Soviet-made replica of an HP programmable calculator. He has been obsessed with various sorts of computer machinery ever since. Having studied in St Petersburg, Russia, his favourite hardware was a bootleg copy (what else?) of IBM370 mainframe which he can still freely operate and maintain. Along with it came PL/I as the natural first choice.
You could call Alex a modeller, since he was conducting various kinds of numerical simulations (mainly thermodynamic computations of multiphase equilibria) for nearly 15 years of his life, just about all over the world. Programmatically, it dealt with the development of C++ and FORTRAN based simulation software.
Putting science behind him, in the late 'nineties he turned towards the commercial side of life, where databases featured in the centrefold. He still possesses a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator 2000 title. He managed then to persuade his employers to use database technology extensively. Borland's free Interbase 6.0 happened to be the first member of the Interbase/Firebird family he put his finger on (it cost nothing!).
The acquaintance appears to have been quite fruitful as he pioneered usage of Interbase/Firebird in a set of commercial applications for the RICOH Corporation.
Alex lives in Münster, a small German province in Westphalia, and enjoys his everyday life together with his wife and two beautiful kids (a boy of 16 and a girl of 4.5).
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Firebird Connectivity Tools or Is there any performance loss out there?
Focussed on the question of choosing a future-safe Firebird database connectivity tools strategy for highly demanding industrial applications. Among ouselves and our customers we were able to formulate the "minimal requirements subset" with which the database connectivity tools should be compliant in order to align with the all-round paradigm of (extremely) short development time in the application lifecycle.
I will talk about the details of the paradigm, the tools we evaluated and simulator software we developed featuring each of these tools.
I will also report on our investigation into the influences of transaction control mode (explicit transaction control or autocommit mode), the number of transactions kept open on the server and database size on total application performance.
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Martijn Tonies
Martijn got his first database knowledge when working with Oracle during his day time job and discovered InterBase soon after. A nice small database engine, capable of great things. He was very interested in what happened after InterBase became open source and in close contact with the Firebird project since the earliest days. Martijn has been using InterBase and Firebird ever since and continues to develop
for and with InterBase and Firebird.
As the founder of Upscene Productions, a small company he started to develop database developer applications, he works with several database engines each day and knows about the differences, problems and annoyances a database developer has to work with.
Martijn is from the south of The Netherlands, Europe and enjoys (online) computer games, animals, being outside and working on his old-timer truck during the scarce spare hours.
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The Firebird System Tables
All popular database engines keep information about the user-metadata in system tables, information that can be browsed and used to construct DDL statements.
Firebird adds another feature: its metadata are stored in an active database, with the effect that changes to data in the
system tables affect metadata and the data is versioned.
This session includes topics on:
- system table structure
- detailed instructions about where to find what information
- protecting your stored procedure language source code
- what can be changed and what cannot
- a set of queries used to retrieve the frequently-asked-info
Stored Procedures, Triggers and Views, Why and How
After a quick introduction of the possible commands in PSQL, we'll take a look at how SPs can be useful and aid you in your product development.
This session includes:
- a description and explantion of each available PSQL command
- examples on why SPs and Views are useful
- re-factoring examples by making use of SPs and Views
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Serg Vostrikov
Sergey Vostrikov is CEO of Devrace company, which develops and markets the FIBPlus connectivity components for Delphi developers. Serg isthe author of a number of articles on this technology (published in German in Europe).
Sergey Vostrikov is also an author of the first Russian book InterBase World. This book contains more than 400 pages devoted to InterBase and Firebird and was republished three times with total runs of more than 10000 copies.
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Managing Firebird Transactions with FIBPlus
The paper is aimed at describing and demonstrating use of Firebird transactions in FIBPlus applications. Different transaction settings will be demonstrated in a special demo application. It will explain how transaction isolation level and transaction access mode influence data modification. The presentation should help developers to use transactions in their applications and to avoid the common problems with record locking.
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Dmitry Yemanov
Dmitry Yemanov is a core developer in the Firebird Project and is coordinator of development. He started programming with Borland C++ in 1996 (various utilities) and
then switched to Delphi and databases in 1998, where he was developing distributed information systems for Russian Ministry of Defence. InterBase 4.2 was his first
experience in the database world. After changing a few jobs and Delphi versions, in 2000 Dmitry became the lead developer in a small company developing accounting
and HR software. Originally, the company used InterBase 6.0 OE but switched to Firebird as soon as it arrived. They used Oracle for their high-end applications.
During that time, Dmitry was an active reader of Firebird related news and mailing lists. It wasn't long before he started digging in the Firebird code and he has never
returned to normal. Starting with version 1.5, he was an active Firebird developer and a release manager. In 2005 he gave up his day job and, to this day, devotes his
working life entirely to Firebird, assisted by regular grants from the Firebird Foundation.
Dmitry lives in Penza, Russia.
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Firebird v2.x and v3.0: the Foreseeable Future
First of all, the project's short-term plans will be presented, starting with version 2.0 and its subsequent releases. We'll outline what has been achieved in version 2.0 and what other improvements and bugfixes are possible to offer based on that codebase (i.e. before version 3.0).
A separate part of this presentation will be dedicated to the Vulcan project, the results it achieved and its role in future Firebird versions.
Finally, we'll talk about the version 3.0 development, its goals, current state and expected timeframe. An updated project roadmap will be introduced.
Cost-based Optimization and Statistics
This presentation is dedicated to the various practical optimization approaches and a detailed description of cost-based optimization. What is a cost and what units is it measured in? How could it be estimated and what depends on a cost? What are pros and cons of the cost-based optimization? We'll answer these and many other questions.
A concept of data statistics will be introduced. We'll discuss the most valuable statistical parameters and how they could affect an execution plan. Also, we'll talk about the related improvements that could appear in the next Firebird versions.
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