Philippe Makowski, Firebird related

Firebird transactions settings

philippe — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 08:35:00 +0100

From the support list, by Ann Harrison, as a reminder :

isc_tpb_consistency can cause performance problems due the fact that it's locking tables and possibly excluding concurrent access.

isc_tpb_concurrency is the design center for Firebird. Readers don't block writers, writers don't block readers, and both get a consistent view of the database.

iisc_tpb_read_committed + isc_tpb_rec_version + isc_tbp_read_only give inconsistent results and occasionally produces an error on a blob read*, but unlike other modes, it does not block garbage collection so it's a good mode for long running read transactions that don't have to get the "right" answer.

isc_tpb_read_committeed + isc_tpb_rec_version has the same performance as isc_tpb_concurrency, but gets inconsistent results - the same query run twice in the same transaction may return different rows.

isc_tpb_read_committed + isc_tpb_no_rec_version + isc_tpb_wait is slower than other modes because it will wait for a change to be commited rather than reading the newest committed version. Like all variants of isc_tpb_read_committed, it does not produce consistent results.

isc_tpb_read_committed + isc_tpb_no_rec_version + isc_tpb_no_wait gives lots and lots of deadlock errors because every time a reader encounters a record that's being changed, it returns an error.

Good luck, Ann

* If you have the bad luck to read a record version which includes a blob and someone else changes the record version and the blob, and that transaction commits, and somebody else comes by and garbage collects the record version and blob before you get around to reading the blob, you'll get an error. Doesn't happen in other modes.

Mageia 1 a Firebird friendly new distribution

philippe — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:41:00 +0200

Mageia 1 is there : http://blog.mageia.org/en/

It is a community driven project and a Firebird friendly distribution with Firebird 2.5.0, PHP, PHP-pdo, Perl, Ruby drivers, Rails adapter, Flamerobin, and Python drivers (kinterbasdb and firebirdsql).

I'm really happy to have now Mageia on my computer, and being one of the packagers.

For people wanting to use Firebird under Gnu/Linux, Mageia can be a really good choice.

The community is active, and in next months will decide what will be the future. Like Firebird, Mageia organisation is community-driven; no commercial management can dictate the path Mageia will take.

Download it, try it !

PS

Some friends of mine created Hupstream a company providing commercial services (like IBphoenix for Firebird) with or around Mageia software, tools or project .

So you can imagine Firebird under Mageia with professional support with IBPhoenix and Hupstream if you want !

Windows Firebird Classic and cache

philippe — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:31:00 +0200

From the Firebird support list, posted by Sean Leyne :

We have over 60 production Firebird servers running Windows, some servers with 100s of database connections.

What you need to remember is:

- Each database connection starts a new server process, so more RAM memory is needed/used

- Each database page cache setting should be kept low, improve performance by reduce the amount of synchronization which occurs between the Firebird processes

- 64 bit versions of Windows (very true with 2008) have a poor algorithm for managing OS page cache, which can result in an excessive amount of cache paging, which severely impacts performance. There are some utilities available (SET_CACHE.EXE) which can set the cache size to definable level (we usually set it to 70% of available RAM).

Firebird on Linux and ICU > 4.2

philippe — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:46:00 +0200

There was a bug in Firebird that did not handle well icu > 4.2 see (http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/browse/CORE-3447)

2.1.4 and 2.5.0 packages in distributions were affected (Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Mageia) because they are using icu 4.4

Adriano fixed it and in these various distro updates are on the way

I know that some of you are using Centos 5.

The problem with Centos 5, is that you can’t have Firebird 2.5 from EPEL
repository. Centos 6 will give you the possibility to have Firebird 2.5 from EPEL6 repository, but seems that Centos6 take a long time to come.
https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=25878
http://wiki.centos.org/QaWiki/6/AuditStatus

You can try to use Scientific Linux instead (http://www.scientificlinux.org)
As Centos, the base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux
(RHEL), recompiled from source, and Scientific Linux 6.0 was released on
March 3, 2011

News from the packaging front

philippe — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:30:00 +0100

I just finished the Firebird 2.5 packages for Mandriva

They are available in Cooker and in Contrib/backports for 2010.1 and 2010.2

Doing this work, I saw that I made a mistake in Fedora packages, so they are updated in Rawhide and EPEL6

I also updated my Fedora 14 repo (http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/makowski/firebird/)

good having doing that before the end of the year !

Mageia : a new GNU Linux distribution

philippe — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 08:55:00 +0200

A new GNU Linux distribution is born : Mageia, a Mandriva Linux fork.

So why speak about this here ?

First, Firebird packages need a maintainer and as I am the one in Mandriva, I will do the same in Mageia

Second, this story remind me a little the Firebird story

Third I'm enthusiast to contribute (may be more than only Firebird related packages) to a such challenging adventure, and in this one, there are people that I really trust.

Long live Mageia : http://www.mageia.org/

Thanks for DOR !

philippe — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:26:00 +0200

Henri Gourverst (UIB creator) set up a new powerful tool : DelphiOnRails

The powerfull association of DOR and Firebird help me to build a nice new AppServer.

The simplicity of coding with DOR help me to focus on database structure and efficient queries.

This AppServeur will be soon deployed in various location in France, and with the low level of maintenance need, the light network protocol used it will be deployed on large and small business units without trouble.

The clients software will not use Lua (choice of the vendor), instead there are two clients one in C# and another in PHP integrated to a web server.

So thanks again Henri, long live to DOR.

Firebird’s 10th birthday a bunch of conferences

philippe — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:51:00 +0200

Dear Firebird Foundation members, dear Firebird users,

To celebrate the Firebird’s 10th birthday and the launch of Firebird 2.5, the Firebird Foudation Committee invite you to setup and participate to a worldwide bunch of conferences.

The idea is to set up conferences every where there is a Firebird Community, to have at least 10 conferences to celebrate the 10th birthday.

These conferences can have various format, from an half day to three days, the content can be advance topics made by core developpers, but also Firebird show case, information about the project it self, Firebird tools show case, speak about Firebird 2.5 new features, etc …

To day we have :

A one day conference in Ukraine On Friday, April 23, 2010
Firebird Developers Day in Brazil, in July
A three days combined HK-Software/Firebird conference in Bremen, Germany in November
Sarajevo,France, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia are planned

It would be nice to have events in countries where we have Firebird users and where we never had a conference before (Poland, USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, etc )

We the coordinate effort with the Mind the Bird campaign, we already have material that can be useful (slides, webinars recording)

We are working on a “10th anniversary event package” organizers could use as core content ( with for example a speech/presentation about Firebird from day one to present and with future plans). It would help organizers that don’t have any local FB developer(s) and can’t afford to invite one.

We need now volunteers :

to take in charge such event in their country
content writers
sponsors hunters
speakers

Soon some web pages will be setup to inform and popularize this initiative.

So please, anyone ready to help, please subscribe to the dedicated mailing list https://lists.firebirdsql.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fbconference

So we can coordinate our efforts.

Thanks,

Philippe Makowski
Firebird Foundation

Firebird 10th anniversary

philippe — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:39:00 +0200

When I became Firebird Foundation President, i did not thought about theFirebird 10th anniversary.

May be I should think twice before saying yes ;)

This anniversary and the coming soon new major version of Firebird seems to boost the Firebird Community, that's a good point.

But it give me more work as President, because I try to help things append.

On the last Firebird Conference at Bergamo, I asked "Do we nee a second wind ?"

I think now that some part of our Project organization have to change, to help more people being involved.

Even if we are a smaller project, may be we can look at the way Fedora project is managed, I like the various way they offer to join

Firebird in OpenSuse

philippe — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:03:00 +0200

yesterday I received this notification :

Hello packager,

This is just FYI. Your package was checked in in distribution "stable"

here is the log from ci_new_pac /work/src/done/STABLE/firebird -> stable

So, good news for Firebird and OpenSuse users, Firebird package will be in official repository for new OpenSuse 11.2

For people wanting to test it, it is in the Factory repository (http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/):

zypper info firebird
Dépot: openSUSE Factory (OSS)
Nom: firebird
Version: 2.1.3.18185.0-1.1
Arch: i586
Fabricant: openSUSE
Installé: Non
État: non installée
Taille une fois installé : 3,4 M
Résumé: SQL relational database management system
Description:
This package contains common files between firebird-classic and
firebird-superserver. You will need this if you want to use either one.

Firebird OpenSuse, SLE prerelease repository

philippe — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:10:00 +0200

I created a prerelase repositories for OpenSuse and SLE

Choose the repository you need and setup Firebird 2.1.3RC1, Flamerobin and the Python driver

Since openSUSE 10.2, you can use the command line tool named zypper to add repositories:

zypper ar <URL_to_your_repo_file>

For example :

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home://pmakowski/openSUSE_11.1/home:pmakowski.repo

More information here : http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/User

Feed back are welcome

Firebird Centos prerelease repository

philippe — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:15:00 +0200

I created a prerelase repository for Centos 5

In order to validate that the packages came from me, you'll want to install my public GPG key on your system. You can take care of that with a single command as root:

rpm --import http://makowski.fedorapeople.org/fb21/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-IBPhoenix

Then create the following file to enabled the repository :

/etc/yum.repos.d/pmakowski.repo

The content of this file should be for x86_64 :

[pmakowski]

name=Philippe Makowski Repo

baseurl=http://makowski.fedorapeople.org/fb21/centos/5/x86_64/

enabled=1

gpgcheck=1

gpgkey=http://makowski.fedorapeople.org/fb21/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-IBPhoenix

The content of this file should be for i386 :

[pmakowski]

name=Philippe Makowski Repo

baseurl=http://makowski.fedorapeople.org/fb21/centos/5/i386/

enabled=1

gpgcheck=1

gpgkey=http://makowski.fedorapeople.org/fb21/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-IBPhoenix

That's all, you can use yum or pirut to install or update Firebird 2.1

Firebird packages for Fedora, Centos, RHEL

philippe — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:32:00 +0200

It's official now, I'm the maintainer of Firebird packages for Fedora and Epel (Centos and RHEL packages) and Firebird packages get pushed into Fedora repositories.

The good news for Firebird users is that they can get Firebird 2.1.2 from Fedora official repositories.

Flamerobin and Kinterbasdb (the Python driver for Firebird) will follow soon, as the PHP module.

The "bad" news is that it give me some more work, and I will have to resolved the futur bugs if they are some (and I guess there will be since I rewrote a new spec file).
I'm not used to, as a Q/A team member of the Firebird project, I'm more used to check and raise bugs than solving them ;)

Stop kidding, I did not used Fedora before (usualy I use Mandriva and Debian), but I'm proud to become a member of this community, working with them is pleasant, and I learned a lot doing that.

So I'll try to do my best for all Firebird, Fedora, Centos users.

Lost connections

philippe — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:54:00 +0200

Last months I saw in various support lists and forum questions about lost connections and Firebird

As said in firebird.conf :

Normally, Firebird uses SO_KEEPALIVE socket option to keep track of

active connections. If you do not like default 2-hour keepalive timeout

then adjust your server OS settings appropriately.

I found a good web page explaining how to setup these values for various OS, so here is the link : http://www.gnugk.org/keepalive.html

Note that MacOsX behaviour is the same as FreeBSD

When Firebird 2.5 will be there, with monitoring tables, it will be possible to kill connections if need.

From the Firebird support list : semaphores exhausted

philippe — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:49:00 +0100

Running FirebirdCS-2.1.1.17910-0.amd64 under Linux Fedora core 9 version

2.6.27.15-78.2.23.fc9.x86_64

When the database is under a high load(i.e. over 100 connections) where

each connection is doing queries and updates, then merely executing

'select count(*) from mon$attachments' causes several of the connections

to die. Client apps report 'error reading data from the connection'.

Sorted the problem by upping both the kernel semaphore settings and

the firebird.conf setting:

respectively :

kernel.sem="1024 64000 1024 512"

and

LockSemCount = 512

This allows 300 concurrent connections to exist, and for the MON$ queries to succeed.

Note :

The Kernel can be configured dynamically. Check the current settings with:

# cat /proc/sys/kernel/sem

250 32000 32 128

To increase the values put something like this in /etc/sysctl.conf:

# SEMMSL SEMMNS SEMOPM SEMMNI

kernel.sem = 1024 32000 256 1024

To apply the settings reboot or call "sysctl -p". Then check the new settings:

# cat /proc/sys/kernel/sem

1024 32000 256 1024

Firebird 2.1.2 on Mips 64

philippe — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:03:00 +0100

Yesterday I get a small nice box, a Gdium that have a 900 Mhz 64bits Loongson CPU

It comes with a Mandriva Linux.

I built Firebird 2.1.2 on it, the only point is that I built it with system ICU :

./autogen.sh --with-system-icu

Bingo, I get a fresh build Firebird 2.1.2 Classic, and some minutes after a Superserver.

Next step, setting up the qmtest suite and the Python driver

No problem to build the Python driver (latest version kinterbasdb-3.3.0)

And nice, qmtests results are ok

Next step was Flamerobin 0.9.0 : no problem all is ok

Mandriva guys can add Firebird rpms to the mips repository

VmWare and Linux

philippe — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:15:00 +0200

Found on the web : http://jaysonrowe.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/vmware-server-tipsntricks/

Seems that the following kernel boot parameters will help performance and stability using Linux 2.6 as a guest:

noapic nolapic apci=off clocksource=acpi_pm elevator=noop

Firebird and Suse

philippe — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:15:00 +0200

May, 20th in the opensuse packaging mailing list, Michal Marek posted the following :

We have a firebird (the opensource SQL database) package in the server:database buildservice project (https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=firebird&project=server%3Adatabase). Unfortunately, this package isn't maintained since some time, which is a pity, because the server:database repository is offered as a community repository in YaST and is advertised as the "Latest updates for database software including Firebird and MySQL".

Since I helped Mandriva to do their packages for Firebird, I jumped and with Michal, we made things happen
Users of Opensuse 10.0,10.1,10.3 and future 11.0 but also SLE 10 can now just use the server:database repository and get Firebird 2.0.4
As soon as the Firebird Project will publish Firebird 2.1.1, packages will be there too.
It was a pleasure to work with Michal for that, and gave me the opportunity to try Open Suse.

Heavy load under MacOs X

philippe — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:15:00 +0200

During the test phase of Firebird 2.1, I played with two new features : global temporary table and monitoring tables.

I never stressed Firebird on MacOs X before, and when I tried to do 300 concurrent connections each one using a temporary table and a select from monitoring tables, my Firebird Classic get into trouble with bad messages in the firebird.log :

Can't load INTL module '/Library/Frameworks/Firebird.framework/Resources/English.lproj/var/intl/fbintl.dylib'

Fatal lock manager error: inconsistent lock table version number; found 144, expected 16, errno: 35

In fact, as Paul Beach suggested, it was not Firebird that have problem, but I did not have enough ressources for Firebird and Launchd

So digging Internet, I found advices for other RDBMS, and I change some system value by creating two new configurations files :

$ cat /etc/sysctl.conf
kern.sysv.shmmax=10485760
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.sysv.shmall=4096
kern.maxproc=2068
kern.maxprocperuid=2068

$ cat /etc/launchd.conf
limit maxproc 2068 2068
limit maxfiles 10240 10240

With these values, no problem, all tests were ok.

I think that we can use lowest values.

Recalculer la sélectivitité des index

philippe — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:34:00 +0100

Quelques fois il peut être utile de forcer le moteur à recalculer la sélectivité des index afin de permettre à l'optimiseur de choisir des meilleurs plans de requête et donc de faire les traitements plus rapidement

Voici une procédure permettant de recalculer la selectivité de tous les index

SET TERM ^; CREATE PROCEDURE SP_CALCSELECTIVITY AS DECLARE VARIABLE IDX VARCHAR(50); DECLARE VARIABLE STMT VARCHAR(75); BEGIN FOR SELECT RDB$INDEX_NAME FROM RDB$INDICES INTO :IDX DO BEGIN STMT = 'SET STATISTICS INDEX ' || :IDX; EXECUTE STATEMENT :STMT; END END ^ SET TERM ;^

Ensuite il suffit de faire :
EXECUTE PROCEDURE SP_CALCSELECTIVITY;

Bein sûr il est préférable de faire cela à un moment où le serveur n'est pas trop occupé.