IBDeveloper and amusing nostaligic InterBase magazine from 1997 and 1998

As you know, IBSurgeon was a publisher of "The InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine" (or shortly IBDeveloper) in 2005 and 2006. There were 4 issues which attracted a lot of interest (up to 20000 of readers) but at that time there was no way to monetize it, so IBSurgeon decided to close the magazine as a redundant line of business.


Now we've put all issues of IBDeveloper to Scribd for easy reading and full text search indexing. You know, there are still "all times greatest hits" articles and materials (like one regarding locking in Firebird by Ann W. Harrison in Issue 2).

Moreover, we decided to put the full version of issue 4, which was not released to public before this time. So if you did not read full 4th issue or others, you have a chance now:

• Issue 1 featured article regarding SAVEPOINTS internals, by Vlad Khorsun, Firebird Core developer
  
• Issue 2 featured article regarding locking by Ann W. Harrison, A Legend
  
• Issue 3 a lot of cool materials and TPC-R based test InterBase vs Firebird (InterBase lost :))
  
• Issue 4, full version TPC-C based tests InterBase vs Firebird vs Yaffil
  

But the interesting fact that it was not the first magazine devoted to InterBase.
In 1997-1998 InterBase Software Corporation published several issues of InterCom magazine. 13 years ago! But still very cool, especially for those who remember those times:

InterCom v01n03, 1997    
InterCom v01n01 - old magazine devoted to InterBase, 1997








May be Firebird needs the third attempt to create the lucky magazine (since 3 is the lucky number) which will not gone in 2 years like InterCom and IBDeveloper did?
Go Firebird!

Friday Fun with Firebird: Curious Backup sizes

There are some tricky and unclear things in Firebird, which do not affect the performance or reliability, but they are curious. Some of them we are going to show, but not explain.

Let's start with restore sizes.
Grab any real-life Firebird database you have (but not an employee.fdb, it will not work with it).
Make a backup.

Then make restore with gbak using only param -c

gbak -c ...

after that make restore to the different database with -v[erbose] output param which make verbose output during restore:

gbak -c -v ...

then take a look at sizes of restored databases.

Are they identical? Usually you can see difference in sizes, equal to 2 database pages. Why turning on verbose output makes such difference? Well, nobody knows :)

Go Firebird! Have a good week-end!

Put papers on Scribd to share and embed

Scribd is a nice system for publishing and,  more important, share books and whitepapers for online reading. We decided to re-work all our whitepapers, manuals, docs and publish them on Scribd:
http://www.scribd.com/ibsurgeon?from_badge_profile_small=1

It gives exciting abilities to enhance our web-site and, moreover, allow to any reader embed  the fully readable version of any "scribded" doc to any site, blog or even newsgroups.

It will look like this:

IBSurgeon: Firebird DBA Tricks and Tips or how to use IBAnalyst to boost your database    

I love web 2.0 :)

People are carefree

This is true - people are carefree. Nobody has recovery plans for their databases, less than half people do regular backups and less than 25% do backups in right way.

Here is a short presentation about IBSurgeon offerings. It is intended for people in trouble, with corrupted database in hands, but can be helpful for people who knows that rainy days happen too.

How IBSurgeon can help you diagnose, fix and prevent corruptions of Firebird and InterBase databases

View more presentations from ibsurgeon.

Not another "hello, world"

This is IBSurgeon's company blog.

Actually, we have our CEO's blog already in place, but it contains more personal information. And here we intend to provide our news and stories about recoveries and optimization tasks we do.

Looks boring? Only at first look. One of the very first recoveries happened in old good 2002: we have recovered InterBase database for Russian Hematology Center, where patients' blood tests results were stored. The reason of corruption was abnormal power termination.

Our urgent recovery service (during half a day) helped doctors to provide patients with necessary medications in time and, may be, even saved someone's life and health.
Looks like a good scenario for next House M.D. episode, isn't it?


Other stories may be not so pathetic, but can contain a lot of real-life scenarios which should be leaned as never-do-it-yourself lesson and can be an interesting reading for Firebird SQL professionals.

So please join us as readers and we will do our best to do not disappoint you. See you soon.