Fbdataguard Community Edition
To support Firebird Project and MindTheBird!, we'll re-print their message here:Hello All Firebirders!Today we start very important activity - building Firebird Case Studies catalog.WHAT IS CASE STUDY?Case study is an example of real-world implementation of certain product. Every year we have numerous corruption requests after vacations.
Unattended computer systems can reach their implementation limits or encounter hidden problems, like lack of space, HDD bad blocks, automatic updates, etc.Firebird is a software too, and it has 'popular' reasons to stop working while administrator enjoys roasted turkey.Before vacations and after them we recommend to check the free space on HDD with database and HDD on backups, check the transaction markers state (gstat -h) for the gaps and limits and, if possible, perform full backup/restore cycle (with gbak -b/gbak -r).These simple actions can save your database from 'vacations' corruptions'. October 4, 2010. The Firebird Project today announces Firebird 2.5, the fifth and newest major release of its open source relational database management system. Enhancements in this new release are pitched at better serving the needs of businesses of any scale, from embedded device to enterprise resource planning solutions.Philippe Makowski, President of the non-profit Firebird Foundation observes that the Firebird 2.5 release is a very important step in Firebird's 10th anniversary year, not just for the Firebird Project but for the whole open-source world, too.'
Today businesses all around the world are looking for mature, cost-effective solutions and Firebird 2.5 offers them a solution that is truly powerful and truly free', he noted.The mix of high performance, small footprint, supreme scalability, silent and simple installation and royalty-free deployment make Firebird a highly attractive choice for all types of software developers and vendors. Firebird deployments are well established around the globe, serving data to hundreds of thousands of business systems with hundreds of users and databases exceeding 300GB.Known Firebird installations number more than 2,000 each day, according to download statistics.' Many of our customers have Firebird databases with sizes from 200GB to 400GB and they keep growing', said Stewart Spink, CTO of Watermark Software.
'The performance improvements in Firebird 2.5 will ensure that their future demands will be satisfied completely.' Alexander Shaposhnikov, CIO of medical distributor Profitmed predicts that Firebird 2.5 will support the growth of Profitmed's business. 'Currently we have a 65Gb database and 250 active users working 24x7.
Pycharm Community Edition
We intend to double both the size of the database and the number of users in two years and we have chosen Firebird 2.5 for this business-critical task.' Firebird binaries are distributed for a variety of system and hardware platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, HP-UX and more. Firebird runs on on x86, x64, PowerPC, Sparc and other hardware platforms, providing an easy migration mechanism between these diverse platforms.The V.2.5 release binaries ship for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux, with MacOSX x86 to follow. Every few days I get an email from someone who has lost all their data because they had a major hardware problem and no backups on a separate device.
Sometimes this is because they don’t even realize the data is stored on their computer. You can mention in your documentation and/or in the software, but it is unlikely to make much difference. History shows that this is a lesson most people have to learn the hard way ( techies included). Mentioning it doesn’t hurt though and it might help to defuse an angry users if you point it out to them after the event. Someone new it IT could not not even recognize where is this dialog from. It's from Windows 3.1. Installation is the first experience that new users have from InterBase and what they see?
At FDD'2010 Dmitry Kuzmenko has presented 2 presentations - the is one about approach to maintain big databases (50-400Gb) in the right way and the second is about restore speed tests.Among other thing Dmitry said that any participant who will send email request to dataguard at ib-aid.com till 20-JUL-2010, will get this tool's 1 year license for free.We just finished to process 108 requests and sent them all (check antispam folder if you did not get it).So, it is interesting to see that approximately 20% of attendees can think about right database maintenance and how to avoid corruption. Other 80% are welcome to our recovery service. 17th of July, Piracicaba, Brazil: The 7th Firebird Developers Day will take place in the UNIMEP university theatre. This is undoubtedly the biggest worlwide event devoted to Firebird - more that 600 people, dozen of speakers and lot of interest.As you may knows, Brazil is the N1 country in terms of number of Firebird users (following with Germany, Russia and USA), and Firebird is the number 1 database in Brazil too.This will be 4th time IBSurgeon sponsors and presents at FDD. This year Dmitry Kuzmenko will speak about big Firebird databases (you may remember that recently we did test with 1Terabyte Firebird database) and about speed of test restores.Also at this event IBSurgeon will announce some serious changes in licensing policy, intended to encourage people to treat Firebird databases in more careful way.We will follow the results of conference and post updates here.
Recently we have joined Campaign, and it's a good time to explain our attitude to Firebird.As you know, currently there are lot of big and small companies involved in open source support and development. Some big companies (like IBM or Oracle) use open-source as mass destruction weapon against competitors, and also split development and/or testing and (definitely!) marketing costs with open-source community.Some companies (like majority of Firebird Foundation members) support open source because they rely on them as part of their business - as platform or in other way.And I doubt that there is company that supports open source project as complete charity, without intention to use its code in this or that way. If you know such company - please refer to it, I'm interested to know.For IBSurgeon the answer for the question 'why you support Firebird' is pretty obvious. Our main business is related with database recovery. Our statistics for last 8 years shows that there is a pretty stable ratio between overall Firebird users and databases crashes.
Noiseware Community Edition
There were some peaks related with pre-release bugs but the baseline is rather stable and has slow growth tendency.If we will exclude peaks we can see for sure that corruptions are mostly caused by lack of administration and hardware failures. This is the part of nature - people make mistakes, hardware is being broken. You may notice a nice banner at the left side of our blog with the '!' Slogan.It means that MindTheBird! Campaign goes public.MindTheBird! Is a Firebird community activation campaign to support Firebird 2.5 Launch.Firebird 2.5 release is very important event for Firebird, but we can turn it into even more valuable thing and use upcoming release of new version to gain attention from IT world.Join MindTheBird now: download MindTheBird materials and put Firebird 2.5 banner or embed presentation like you see below.With this very small help from each Firebirder it's possible to gain significant attention from the other world.Now it is time to make the world to mind the bird! At last, analysts in Evans Data have noticed the one of the largest open source databases - Firebird.Considering the fact that MySQL is almost dead (and never was true open source database, especially for ISVs who wanted to bundle their apps with database engine), I would say that Firebird and PostgreSQL are the only open source databases of choice (and in my experience Firebird is much more suitable for bundling with Windows apps ).It took only 10 years, and we now see Firebird as a choice in Evans Data Corp.