Two fantastic days talking about Firebird with great people. That’s how my first Firebird Developers Day was.

Arriving at the Unimep Theater

I learned a few new tricks and left with a very good perspective about the project’s future. This perspective I now share with you.

Firebird 3.0

We can wait a hybrid based on ClassicServer but with good doses of code from both SuperServer and Vulcan. And that’s good. No huge changes that would take decades to stabilize. The Firebird team’s proposal, according to Dmitry Yemanov, is evolutionary and not revolutionary.

Very early in the morning there was a lot of people already.

Dmitry Yemanov also showed strong opinions about having shared data and metadata caches. It seems ClassicServer’s dedicated cache is going to be deprecated very soon. Amen.

Installation and configuration will be easier with only one executable for all architectures.

In the MasterClass I had the opportunity to express how much I like the monitoring tables and how easier they make the life of a Firebird DBA. The good news is that it seems the Firebird team is also interested in extending them.

I was the last one to leave! :)

Firebird 4?

When I asked about a native SQL parser, Dmitry Yemanov said it is very interesting for Firebird and it’s in the plans. But there is no schedule and he can’t make promises.

Internally Firebird translates SQL into a recursive language called BLR. Statements are then executed in BLR. In theory a native SQL parser would bring a slight performance increase. Most importantly, it would make extending Firebird’s SQL syntax a much simpler task.

The same goes to having value distribution histograms in indices. No schedule.

Meetings

Another fantastic part of FDD was meeting and getting to know our Russian colleagues Dmitry Kuzmenko (IBSurgeon), Dmitry Yemanov (Firebird SQL) e Michael Phlippenko (Fast Report). And also some of the Speakers as Alexandre Benson Smith (Thor Software), o Professor Beto (Unimep) e o Luis Paulo (Chamando.com.br).

None of that would be possible, of couse, without the folks at Firebase.com.br. A Big Thanks to them and in special to Carlos Cantu for organizing this event.

See you next year!

This unimep terminal speaks for me.

Good Night. Waiting automatic energy shutdown in a few moments.