New Zealand’s first InterBase seminar
I love CodeGear! If only because I am able to focus on promoting the database I love - we had our first InterBase seminar this week. Even when Borland sold primarily Delphi and InterBase - we did not have an InterBase seminar. But the new features in InterBase 2007 _really_ make a difference and are really worth taking a look at.
The focus of the seminar was on the new features and how you can use them to increase performance and reliability of your InterBase or Firebird database.
Major point: Most people in the audience had long since turned "force writes" on. This significantly degrades database performance, but it is crucial - as InterBase is an embedded database, customer sites often power off their computers, don’t have battery backup, etc. To save a lot of hassle around support for corrupted databases (which would happen with *any* database, not just InterBase), they turn "force writes" on. You do this by typing "gfix -write sync database.ib" - and you can see that it is in operation by typing "gstat -L database.ib" - in Attributes you will see "force write".
But as I said, the performance hit is quite substantial. With InterBase 2007 Journals, you can *get back that async performance*. Because the journals are synchronously written and written sequentially on disc, putting your journals on a different disc (that also has disc caching turned off on the OS/drive) will give you back a whole heap of performance. Yet another reason to give your customers the option to use InterBase - if you are using Firebird, try avoiding the extensions. Firebird is a *great* database, but if you avoid the extensions you give your customers the choice of InterBase. That of course means you have to avoid the InterBase extensions as well (if you deploy Firebird) - such as temporary tables and the BOOLEAN datatype (among other things).
Then there are journal archives - but I should probably get that white paper out. It has pictures and everything.
We got very good reception of the seminar, high ratings, everyone went away saying what a great seminar it was (well, our distributor called them afterwards and they said it was). If you use InterBase or Firebird, push for a seminar from your local Evangelist.
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Posted by Richard Vowles archive on November 30th, 2006 under Uncategorized |
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December 24th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
In an interbase 2007 demonstration session by Jeroen Pluymers in Belgium in December 2006, the journal archives appeared no good when trying to re-mount them as a database.
It was a very simple test to show off the added functionality, but this is exactly the type of error I do not want to discover upon hitting a customer’s probably already disastermode type of scenario.
my conclusion : I ll stick to SQL Anywhere 7->10 but I would be extremely interested to hear from you why you consider interbase 2007 a good database from the TECHNICAL point.
tia
January 8th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Dear Mullah,
Please spell my name and facts correctly: I was the guy who did the demo, and it was not about the journalling demo, but the incremental backup demo.
Due to time constraints I did only explain the journalling, but did not demo them.
This what happened:
I didn’t get the official Interbase 2007 license in time, and the morning of my presentation the evaluation-license expired.
To try to run the demos (and I explained this to the public in detail it could potentially break some of my demos), I tried setting back the date of my laptop.
All the demos worked, except the incremental backup demo of my original database.
This is not an interbase bug, but the way incremental backup works: in both the live database and the incremental backup file, a timestamp is stored, and depending on the timestamp difference between the live database and the incremental backup, pages are being copied over from the live database to the incremental backup.
Because I fiddled with my laptop date and time, some of the pages were not copied to the incremental backup (even on a fresh incremental backup) because the timestamp in the live database did not match with the date and time on my laptop.
After doing a regular backup/restore, it started to work again because the timestamps then matched again.
I have communicated this back to the guys that originally created all the demos (Roland Appel and Daniel Magin).
It is very likely that the main cause was that I changed the date/time of my laptop to a point BEFORE the original database was created.
As with all new database features, there are some things I need to sort out on this as soon as I get time for it (last quarter was crunch time):
- how this impacts time zone differences
- how this impacts day light saving times
Kind regards,
Jeroen at Pluimers dot com
January 8th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Dear Mullah,
Please spell my name and facts correctly: I was the guy who did the demo, and it was not about the journalling demo, but the incremental backup demo.
Due to time constraints I did only explain the journalling, but did not demo them.
This what happened:
I didn’t get the official Interbase 2007 license in time, and the morning of my presentation the evaluation-license expired.
To try to run the demos (and I explained this to the public in detail it could potentially break some of my demos), I tried setting back the date of my laptop.
All the demos worked, except the incremental backup demo of my original database.
This is not an interbase bug, but the way incremental backup works: in both the live database and the incremental backup file, a timestamp is stored, and depending on the timestamp difference between the live database and the incremental backup, pages are being copied over from the live database to the incremental backup.
Because I fiddled with my laptop date and time, some of the pages were not copied to the incremental backup (even on a fresh incremental backup) because the timestamp in the live database did not match with the date and time on my laptop.
After doing a regular backup/restore, it started to work again because the timestamps then matched again.
I have communicated this back to the guys that originally created all the demos (Roland Appel and Daniel Magin).
It is very likely that the main cause was that I changed the date/time of my laptop to a point BEFORE the original database was created.
As with all new database features, there are some things I need to sort out on this as soon as I get time for it (last quarter was crunch time):
- how this impacts time zone differences
- how this impacts day light saving times
Kind regards,
Jeroen at Pluimers dot com