Archive for the ‘Firebird’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/12
Google published an interesting graph generated from their internal data based on their indexed web pages.
A quick summary of popular encodings based on the graph:
- Unicode – almost 50% and rapidly rising
- ASCII – 20% and falling
- Western European* – 20% and falling
- Rest – 10% and falling
Conclusion: if you do something with the web, make sure you support Unicode.
When you are using Delphi, and need help with transitioning to Unicode: contact me.
–jeroen
* Western European encodings: Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15.
Reference: Official Google Blog: Unicode nearing 50% of the web.
Edit: 20100212T1500
Some people mentioned (either in the comments or otherwise) that a some sites pretend they emit Unicode, but in fact they don’t.
This doesn’t relieve you from making sure you support Unicode: Don’t pretend you support Unicode, but do it properly!
Examples of bad support for Unicode are not limited to the visible web, but also applications talking to the web, and to webservices (one of my own experiences is explained in StUF – receiving data from a provider where UTF-8 is in fact ISO-8859: it shows an example where a vendor does Unicode support really wrong).
So: when you support Unicode, support it properly.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Firebird, IIS, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development, SQL Server, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, Web Development | 7 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/05
This is very handy on testing your software on multiple versions of FireBird.
Now someone that expands this to InterBase as well :-)
Le Vosgien du Net · Switch between versions of Firebird SQL Server.
–jeroen
Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird, InterBase | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/01
One of the applications that I’m currently involved with will in the future be used in different European countries.
Since it is developed in Delphi 2007, and uses InterBase 2007 we have chosen to use the ISO8859_15 character set: it is a single byte character set very similar to ISO8859_1, but supports the euro sign (€) and some other characters (Š, š, Ž, ž, Œ, œ and Ÿ).
When testing, we found out that UPPER would not always function as we expected.
Hence below some explanation about how UPPER behaves depending on the character sets and collation sequences you specify.
Note: most of this also holds for other versions of InterBase and for FireBird versions, but I have not checked everything with all versions yet, FireBird might be different as this piece of documentation shows.
If anyone does have the results for other InterBase or FireBird versions, please let me know the results.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Database Development, Delphi, Development, Firebird, InterBase | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/18
Somehow, CodeCentral managed to not only delete my uploaded CodeRage 4 session materials (the videos are fine!), but also newer uploads with other submissions.
Since I’m in crush mode to get the BASTA! and DelphiLive 2009 Germany sessions done, and all Embarcadero sites having to do with their membership server perform like a dead horse, I have temporary moved the downloads, and corrected my earlier post on the downloads.
I have notified Embarcadero of the problems, so I’m pretty sure they are being addressed on their side as well.
Edit 20090919: Embarcadero indicated that between 20090913 and 20090914 there has been a database restore on CodeCentral. Some entries therefore have been permanently lost.
When I get back from the conferences, and CodeCentral is more responsive, I’ll retry uploading it there, and correct the posts.
In the mean time, be sure not to save shortcuts to the current locations, as they are bound to change.
The are the new download locations can all be found in my xs4all temporary CodeRage 4 2009 download folder.
This is the full list of my CodeRage 4 sessions and places where you can download everything: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, ASCII, CodeRage, CommandLine, Conferences, CP437/OEM 437/PC-8, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, Software Development, SQL Server, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Windows-1252 | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/13
Embarcadero has made available the replays of the CodeRage 4 sessions.
You can find them in the CodeRage 4 sessions overview.
In order to download them from that overview, NOTE: To access this session replay, you must be logged into EDN. you can login or sign-up (which is free).
To make it easier to find all the relevant downloads, below is an overview of my sessions and their links.
Let me know what you use it for, I’m always interested!
Update 20090918: changed the download locations because CodeCentral messed up.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, ASCII, C#, C# 2.0, CodeRage, CommandLine, Conferences, CP437/OEM 437/PC-8, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Java, Prism, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/11
Not only can you download CodeRage 4 session on materials on Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ, but below you can also find the chat transcripts below.
VIP Room Transcript with Q&A
(9/11/2009 8:13:51 AM) The topic is: Session Room 2 – “Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ” by Jeroen Pluimers
(5:38:29 PM) Christine_Ellis [christinellis@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:38:37 PM) Christine_Ellis left the room.
(5:38:46 PM) Robert_Evans [resevans@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:46:29 PM) davidi: johnhofland asked: Do you have any expirience when the queue system (server) fails? We have an application where speed is less relevant then then the message has to be delivered. Are messages saved when bringing up again?. Answer: The Messaging system keeps it in the queue. when the recipient or server come up – the message gets delivered. That’s tbe beuty of the architecture.
(5:47:34 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: https://wiert.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/coderage-4-session-materials-available-for-download/
(5:48:47 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/coderage/
(5:52:14 PM) The topic is: Session Room 2 – “Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs” by Jeroen Pluimers
Public Room Transcript
(9/11/2009 8:13:51 AM) Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – “Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ” by Jeroen Pluimers
(9/11/2009 8:24:45 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: hi everyone; jibber lost the connection, just like the web interface over the last couple of days.
(9/11/2009 8:25:11 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: hopefully it stays alive for the next two sessions though.
(9/11/2009 8:25:49 AM) Nicole_Boivin: Sorry David. Wrong room. The comment was meant for Room 1. I am currently multi-tasking to the extreme: phone call, both sessions and an app for my phone info. In general I am impatient person. I insist that the apps I build launch under 2 seconds and I start to hammer them that fast. The clients are usually impressed.
(9/11/2009 8:28:20 AM) davidi: yes – don’t auto-create forms and load them dynamically. Delphi client apps can come up fast :)
(5:15:34 PM) b_fisher left the room.
(5:15:51 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: If you have questions; please queue them up so I can start looking at them.
(5:15:58 PM) b_fisher [rcf2@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:16:41 PM) Nicole_Boivin: So right David. Also proper management of resources, using in-memory databases such as TClientDataSet, fast components such as TVirtualTreeview, so on. Anyway at this point I am not only commenting in the wrong room but well beyond the time window for Michael Swindell’s presentation. I look forward to the downloads as my day job keeps interfering with my session attention. Cheers
(5:22:54 PM) Thomas_Grubb: Jeroen, I missed the very beginning. You are using the ActiveMQ to build one big distributed application or one application for a system of applications
(5:22:58 PM) Thomas_Grubb: ?
(5:24:19 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: We use ActiveMQ to be able to switch the middleware from a Delphi+Firebase one (running on Windows) to a Java + Firebird one (running on Windows) or Java + DB/2 one (running on AS/400)
(5:25:13 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: the really cool thing is that clients do not need to know anything about the servers (or maybe I should say ‘senders’ to clients and ‘receivers’ to servers)
(5:25:39 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: so you can switch on the fly, or even (if you keep everything stateless) have a server farm or fall back scenario
(5:27:37 PM) Thomas_Grubb: Was there ever a concern with your project about being tied to one middleware? For many years, I worked for NASA’s GMSEC (now open source), which is a multi-language message oriented abstraction API that supports multiple middleware (Tibco SmartSockets, GSFC Message Bus, and I believe IBM WebSphere and ActiveMQ as of this month), e.g., write to the C/C++/Java/Perl API and it can work with any of those middleware, allowing them to be swapped out. (I wrote a Delphi API to GMSEC, but it was dropped because no customers were requesting it :-( )
(5:29:06 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: Since ActiveMQ is well known, has been stable for a long time, and runs on many platforms, it was never a question to switch to other types of middleware.
(5:29:49 PM) Thomas_Grubb: The reason GMSEC existed is because middleware kept coming and going too fast for our customers (NASA likes to think long term). At one time, GMSEC has supported ICS’ Message Bus, Elvin, and a few others.
(5:30:21 PM) Thomas_Grubb: How is the speed of ActiveMQ with Delphi?
(5:30:34 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: This whole project is a proof of concept, so no ‘really long term’ things yet.
(5:31:33 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: If you keep your connection open, it is really quickly. Within a VM you can have round trips (client sends request so server; server sends response back to client on a different queue) in milliseconds
(5:31:54 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: this includes the XML serialization/deserialization
(5:32:15 PM) Thomas_Grubb: Message Oriented Middleware are extremely cool and definitely the way to go for a large distributed system of applications (like a satellite control center)
(5:32:28 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: it is!
(5:33:18 PM) Thomas_Grubb: The reason I asked about the Delphi overhead is because I mis-wrote the Delphi wrapper for GMSEC and it doubled the time (but was 10x easier to use)! :-)
(5:34:01 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: Oops :-)
(5:34:44 PM) Carlos_Adolfo_Garcia_Anaya [dolfuz@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:36:19 PM) Carlos_Adolfo_Garcia_Anaya: I can’t enter to the conferecnes, is there any problem now?
(5:36:37 PM) Thomas_Grubb: Of course, since the comm time was the real concern it only became a problem when hundreds of messages started coming in per second
(5:36:40 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: @Carlos: Live Meeting is up and running fine here
(5:36:52 PM) Carlos_Adolfo_Garcia_Anaya: :( thanks jeroen
(5:37:35 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: @Thomas: so your Delphi stuff was server as well as client?
(5:38:26 PM) Robert_Evans [resevans@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:38:53 PM) Erwin_Mouthaan [mouthaane@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:39:46 PM) davidi left the room.
(5:40:31 PM) davidi [davidi@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:47:23 PM) Borland [jajackson@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:47:29 PM) Thomas_Grubb: Thanks for your presentation. It’s great to see Delphi being used with MOMs!
(5:47:35 PM) Thomas_Grubb: About your question, the Delphi/GMSEC stuff was concerned with the client. The middleware provided the server code and was hidden from the clients. (In the context of your project if I understand it correctly, the Firebird app would be considered another client)
(5:47:40 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: https://wiert.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/coderage-4-session-materials-available-for-download/
(5:47:41 PM) Neville_Cook [neville+cook@chat.codegear.com/jwchat] entered the room.
(5:47:48 PM) Thomas_Grubb: Got to go now… Good luck with your other presentations
(5:47:55 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: Bye Thomas!
(5:48:03 PM) Thomas_Grubb left the room.
(5:48:43 PM) Jeroen_Pluimers: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/coderage/
(5:50:15 PM) Neville_Cook left the room.
(5:52:14 PM) Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – “Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs” by Jeroen Pluimers
–jeroen
Posted in Component Development, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Firebird, Java, Software Development, Unicode, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/09
My CodeRage 4 session materials are available for download:
CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. while I write this :-)
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).
Let me know if you download, and what you are using the sample code for.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, CodeRage, CommandLine, Conferences, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, SQL Server, TFS (Team Foundation System), Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/05
I just finished recording my CodeRage 4 sessions:
- Practical XML in Delphi
- Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ
- Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs
CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. next week :-)
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).
This week, I found some time do migrate all the sample projects to the release versions of Delphi Win32 2010 and Delphi Prism 2010.
Delphi Win32 2010 works like a charm: it is much faster and has a much smaller footprint than any other Galileo based IDE.
In fact, it feels almost as fast as the pre-Galileo based IDE’s.
With the added benefit that all the new features make me much more productive, not the least because it has not yet crashed on me this week once.
Crashing has been a frequent thing on me since Delphi 4 (maybe I should not even mention that number ), for most IDE’s at least a couple of times a week, so this is good.
Delphi Prism 2010 works really nice too, it is rock solid, and the language as some great features not found in other .NET languages.
But it still needs a tiny bit more polishing on the Visual Studio IDE Integration part.
There are a few things not as smoothly integrated as I’m used to in C# and VB .NET (for instance when adding assembly references; C# and VB.NET allow you to do that from multiple places in the IDE; Delphi Prism from only one).
I know it is nitpicking (the same holds for the Team Foundation System integration in the Visual Studio IDE: ever tried to add files or folders? There is only one icon that allows you to do it. Ever tried to move files or folders around? No way you can drag & drop, in fact you can move only 1 file or folder at a time, and then the folder tree leaves you at the target).
The Embarcadero folks have worked hard on developer productivity in the Delphi Win32 2010 IDE.
(Did I mention the F6 key? It is an awesome way of directly jumping into configuration dialogs a zillion levels deep.
Did I mention the Ctrl-D key? It instantly reformats your source code to your formatting settings).
So maybe it is now time to put some of that effort into the Prism side as well.
Back to my CodeRage sessions: the recordings are done, they will soon become available as downloads together with the samples/slides.
Keep watching :-)
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, Java, Package Development, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System), Unicode, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/03
If you get this error message:
Sep 3, 2009 5:16:24 PM de.aderon.dl.adapter.DataAdapter getConnection
SEVERE: error DataAdapter getConnection : GDS Exception. 335544379. unsupported on-disk structure for file C:\\develop\\Db\\17_20090314.fdb; found 32779.13, support .
Reason: unsupported on-disk structure for file C:\\develop\\Db\\17_20090314.fdb; found 32779.13, support .
Most answers found by google mention that your ODS (on disk structure) is too new for your Firebird version.
But in this case, the portname was pointing to InterBase 2009 (relatively new) in stead of Firebird (2.1.1) also relatively new.
The solution was to fix the connection string:
<key name="connection_uri"><value>jdbc:firebirdsql:127.0.0.1/3050:C:\\develop\\Db\\17_20090314.fdb</value></key>
<key name="connection_uri"><value>jdbc:firebirdsql:127.0.0.1/30521:C:\\develop\\Db\\17_20090314.fdb</value></key>
Firebird 2.1.1 was running on port fbs_211 (decimal 30521), but the jdbc Firebird driver does not understand service names like fbs_211, only hard-coded TCP/IP ports like 30521.
InterBase 2009 was running onport 3050.
–jeroen
Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird, InterBase | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/08/13
Our strategy is that in all of our InterBase and Firebird databases, the column definitions are based on domains.
But some of our databases do not have that for all columns (usually because we got involved later in the development cycle).
When you forget to define a column based on a domain, then both InterBase and Firebird will create a new system domain on the fly that starts with ‘RDB$’.
So if you forget, you get a new system domain for every column!
The below query will list those columns. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird, InterBase | 4 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 