The week began in storm with the Jim Starkey (interbase father)
letter in wich he express his opinions about current state of code
we got from Borland (version 1.0.2) :”As most of you know, I’ve
adopted an arm’s length policy towards Firebird. It’s not my
product any more, it’s yours. I’ve tried to keep my involvement to
a relatively lofty architectural level, offering advice when
solicited, and letting the chips fall where they may.
Stated policy notwithstanding, Ann asked my help finding an
obscure event delivery problem for a customer on the verge of
bleeding to death. Other than the odd peek to refresh my memory,
this is my first involvement in the code base since I left
Interbase in 1991.
…
interbase has two mechanisms to deliver event notification. On
systems that supportthreads, the remote interface starts a thread
that listens on an auxiliary port for an event notification
message. On system that don’t support threading (or don’t use
threading), the events first written to the auxiliary port, then a
1 byte out of band packet (MSG_OOB) packet is sent to deliver a
SIGURG signal to client, and the signal handler reads the event
packet and delivers the event notification at signal state.The
first bug is that the Linux multi-threaded client was asking for
and getting ptype_out_of _band. This caused the server to send a
one byte out of band packet following each event notification
message. In theory, while sloppy and inefficient, this should have
been benign. An apparent Linux networking bug, however,
occasionally interjected the out of band byte into the regular
socket stream, effectively corrupting the stream. I haven’t probed
the boundaries”
Blas Somoza stoped the cleaning activity on cvs tree because we
heading to the first Release Candidate for V1.5 ,this week he got
parse.cpp build with bison :”After some work I get parse.cpp build
with bison and maintaining yacc compatibility (with the MINGW
port).”
FirebirdSQL Product News ==
InterXpress for Firebird V1.0 has been released and is
available: http://www.upscene.com/ This driver
supports Borland’s dbExpress technology
The Firebird .Net Data Provider Release Candidate V1.0 is
available for download:
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1048783343:23553&page=ibp_download#NET
An updated snaphot of the IBPhoenix ODBC Driver is
availablehttp://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1048783343:23553&page=ibp_60_odbc
An updated version of IBProvider (V2.1.1) http://www.ibprovider.com/eng/trial.html
FirebirdSQL In the News ==
Firebird is mentioned in an article on open source databases in
InfoWorld http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/03/07/10osource_1.html
: “Another open-source database that is beginning to turn heads is
Firebird (firebird.sourceforge.net/).
Born of the opening of Interbase’s source code, Firebird seems to
be gathering fans in the open-source world. Given Interbase’s long
history, Firebird is quite mature for a relatively new open-source
entry.”
New IBPhoenix Research Article contributed by Pascal Chong
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&s=1048783343:23553&page=ibp_firebird_on_linux
.A brief guide to installing and using Firebird on Linux . There is
a mention of this article on OSnews : http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3100&entry=1
FirebirdSQL Fun ==
Say hello to Sparky, Firebird’s first beta fluffy toy, and
mascot… http://www.ibphoenix.com/NF47_5.gif
End Fun ==