[fpc-pascal] Looking for a Firebird book?

Michael Van Canneyt michael at freepascal.org
Wed Apr 9 11:03:31 CEST 2008



On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Matt Emson wrote:

> Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 
> Any documentation for Interbase 5.5 or 6.0 should be fairly helpful.
> 
> TBH, the way Firebird did security last time I looked, was pretty similar to
> the way SQL Server does it if you don't use integrated security. Adding users
> was hell, but adding grants etc was pretty simple.
> 
> The bigger issue with Firebird was that it was so unstable (but then, so is
> Interbase) and required a lot of fiddling to stop it  misbehaving (some of
> which might have been the archaic components and poor code I inherited.) I
> won't vent my spleen about Interbase/Firebird, except to say: it works really
> well till you start writing UDF libraries in Pascal. The Free UDF lib is buggy
> and also there are a number of subtly different versions floating around and
> no real version control. It has some nice features (Stored Procedures and the
> "for select ... suspend" mechanism) but I would never use Interbase in
> production again and would need to see pretty conclusive proof that Firebird
> had improved greatly. I did read they now have a PL/SQL emulation layer...
> that sounds really nice.

Strange that you say this. We have firebird databases in production at 
more than a thousand sites, ranging from simple desktop installations to
sites with more than 500 simultaneous users. Firebird didn't fail on
us once.

I must say that we don't use UDFs at all, except the pretty trivial
BIN_AND and BIN_OR.

The only negative thing I can say about Firebird is that it can produce
a corrupt backup file.

Michael.



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