Announcements of the reports of the 3rd Russian Conference on Firebird DBMS

As you already know , on September 29 in Moscow the 3rd Russian Firebird DBMS Conference will be held. Most Firebird deployments in past years were left without proper lighting, although Firebird is used as an important part of the IT infrastructure in companies and organizations such as MICEX, Aeroflot, Vneshtorgbank, the Federal Court Bailiffs Service, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, ECCO, Finn Flare, Profitmed , Bau Center and many others. Being a fully open and free DBMS (without dual licensing, like, say, MySQL ), Firebird allows you to build powerful industrial systems with databases of hundreds of gigabytes, while presenting quite modest requirements for hardware.
Today we publish announcements of the most interesting reports of the upcoming conference and hope that it will attract the attention of Habrahabr readers. After the conference, presentations will be made publicly available.

Firebird 3: first acquaintance

Dmitry Emanov, leading architect of the Firebird project, answers the questions.

What will the report be about?

The report is a technical review of Firebird version 3.0, which is currently in active development. Within its framework the goals and objectives set by the project for this version will be announced. It also reveals the features of the architecture of this version, the approach to solving scalability problems on SMP / multi-core systems, ODS 12 innovations.

Why is this interesting?

Experienced developers know that the DBMS for a software product must be selected with a margin of functions and capabilities, since the requirements for systems are constantly growing, and during operation, the number of users and the size of databases exceed the planned, sometimes many times. Firebird 3 is implemented as an important stage of the FirebirdSQL project, a stage that will bring our DBMS to a new level of performance and reliability, so it’s already important for developers to know future possibilities.
In my report, I will focus on the expected changes in terms of query optimization and statistics collection, as well as performance monitoring. This is especially important for large databases, which are getting bigger in Firebird. I will also briefly touch upon a number of functional changes, in particular in the areas of security and the SQL language. My colleagues Alex Peshkov and Vlad Khorsun will reveal these questions in more detail.
')

New Security Architecture in Firebird 3

Questions answered by Alex Peshkov, the leading developer of the project Firebird

What will the report be about?

In my report, I will consider the new features of Firebird 3 from a security point of view. Due to the separation of all network interactions into a single “network server” module in Firebird 3, it is possible to easily connect various authorization plug-ins and very easily implement integration with systems such as Radius, etc. But that's not all, as the capabilities of the new architecture allow for the “fine-tuning” of access rights at the level of both the server and the databases.

What is most remarkable about the report?

Security is one of the key points for a modern DBMS server. At the time of InterBase, this problem was one of the most painful places for developers, but now the situation is changing - Firebird 2.1 introduced Windows Trusted Authentication (single-login database using Windows authentication), 2.5 expands these capabilities, and in 3.0 developers will get unprecedented powerful and convenient security mechanisms that allow you to implement security for applications of any level, from embedded single-user to ERP with hundreds of users.

Large Firebird databases

Questions answered by Alexey Kovyazin, IBSurgeon Ltd

What will the report be about?

My report will be devoted to the features of operating large Firebird databases. In recent years, Firebird databases of 50GB in size do not surprise anyone, 350-500GB of databases are exploited industrially, and Firebird developers and administrators are now faced with problems that have previously bothered only their colleagues working with Oracle and MSSQL.
IBSurgeon Ltd has gained considerable experience in ensuring the performance of large Firebird databases, which I will try to share.

Why is this interesting? What is most remarkable about the report?

Sooner or later, every developer or administrator will face the fact that his Firebird database has grown out of diapers and needs professional service. I will talk about the main misconceptions associated with the large Firebird databases, touch on the example with the Firebird database at 1 Terabyte, and also show you how to use the tools and techniques of IBSurgeon Ltd to ensure the high level of availability and performance of Firebird.
I think professional Firebird developers and administrators will be interested in a story about how you can implement database access auditing, analyze SQL queries of closed Firebird and InterBase applications, find problematic queries and extract SQL query plans on the fly.

New in SQL language in Firebird 2.5 and Firebird 3.0

Vlad Khorsun, Lead Developer of the Firebird Project, answers the questions.
My report will be devoted to new features of the SQL language implemented in Firebird 2.5 and planned for Firebird 3.0. Version 2.5 introduced a lot of interesting things, such as autonomous transactions and queries to several databases, and in version 3.0 there will be even more features that application developers will like.

Why is your report interesting?

Most of the time, programmers working with Firebird communicate with the DBMS in the SQL language, so it is logical that they should be interested in innovations and extensions of the language.
The implementation of the SQL language in Firebird has traditionally been and remains comfortable, complete and feature-rich, and in version 3.0 we continue this tradition.
In Firebird 3.0, many interesting new features will be added, such as windowing (analytic) functions, PSQL packages, the ability to write external functions, stored procedures and triggers in C / C ++, Java, C #, etc. In the report I will try to cover all the most important points and tell you more about the innovations in SQL. Since Firebird 3 snapshots are already available, everyone can try many of the new SQL features themselves and ask specific questions at the conference.

Firebird, FIBPlus and MDT - build systems with hundreds of users!

Sergey Vostrikov, Devrace CEO, answers the questions.

What will your report be about?

The report will focus on the performance of information systems using Firebird and demonstrating the FIBPlus and Mirror Database Tools (MDT) technological connectivity to developers of such systems.
Practice shows that in a conventional information system, an increase in the number of users of an information system and an increase in the size of the database leads to a significant deterioration in performance.
These problems often begin to be solved by increasing the hardware capacity of the server.
Unfortunately, this may not always help. As part of the report, practical MDT technology will be described and demonstrated, which was created specifically for systems using Firebird and which will allow to increase the performance of FIBPlus-based applications without changing (or with minimal changes) in the code.

Why is this interesting?

Any user expects quick response from software products, and therefore performance issues affect all developers. Throughout the entire period of FIBPlus, we have paid great attention to this. As a result, any developer who uses FIBPlus has at its disposal a number of tools specifically focused on reducing the number of requests, caching system information, etc. All this is available, but requires developers to encode various cached data updating schemes, to check up-to-date , handling loss of communication with the server, etc. As part of the current report, an approach will be demonstrated in which the whole headache of these and, in fact, many other problems is assumed by a bundle of two products: FIBPlus and MDT.

FastReport.Net and FastReport VCL 5 - what's new for developers

Mikhail Filippenko, CEO of Fast Reports , answers the questions.

What will the report be about?

Rather, it is not even a report, but a collection of “tricks” that speed up the obtaining of long-awaited results (reports) from databases by orders of magnitude.

Why is this interesting?

It is known that databases and reports go hand in hand.
Agree, when working with databases, developing systems, more attention should be focused on the development of databases, queries, optimization of size and performance. Visible part - the results, which are just of interest to the customer, time is paid on the residual principle. I will try to tell you how to set up building spectacular reports at this most remaining time using the example of our most advanced product today - FastReport.Net. In particular - the use of so-called "smart objects".
In addition, I will acquaint adherents of the proven FastReport on the Delphi-platform with innovations that developers are waiting for in the fifth version of this product.

Success stories with Firebird :

• Building distributed systems in Firebird. Experience of using the AVARDA.ReplicationSystem system in the federal hypermarket chain Baucenter - a report by Kirill Sinitsyn, Deputy General Director of Ansoft Company
• Using Firebird in high-load web projects - Igor Klopov, LensArt project manager ( www.lensart.ru ),
• Building an accounting system in Firebird DBMS. Experience of use in gas distribution organizations.
  Konstantin Gaer, Maxim Kuzmin, OJSC Khabarovskkraygaz.