An Updated Firebird Book

By Helen Borrie

For the last 12 months our writer-in-residence Helen Borrie has been busy writing "The Firebird Book (Second Edition)" which will bring our existing content up to date for Firebird V2.5. This new publication will be distributed initially in instalments in electronic formats (PDF, ePub and possibly others). The first collection of chapters appears on the IBPhoenix subscription DVD dated July 2011.

The following chapters are now availble.

• Chapters 1 to 5 - Firebird 101
• Chapter 33 - Configuring Firebird
• Chapter 34 - Configuration Parameters
• Chapter 36 - Protecting the Server
• Chapter 37 - Database Level Security
• Chapter 38 - Monitoring and Logging Features
• Appendix 1 - Internal and External Functions
• Appendix 2 - Reserved Keywords
• Appendix 4 - Firebird Limits
• Appendix 5 - System Tables and Views
• Appendix 7 - Error Codes
• Appendix 9 - Database Repairs
• Appendix 11 - Healthcare for Databases

The original "The Firebird Book: a Reference for Database Developers", also written by Helen Borrie, covered Firebird versions 1.0 and 1.5 and was published by Apress in 2004, to rave reviews. Since then, as first Firebird V2.0 and later V2.1 emerged, IBPhoenix has been publishing an updating Supplement in PDF format, also authored by Helen, that has followed the structure of the original book.

The new edition will largely follow the organisation of the original, packaging the Firebird essentials and know-how in eight or nine parts, each consisting of groups of chapters reflecting a typical workflow for developers learning a database management system in new territory. Up to a dozen appendices provide quick reference to facts, error codes, internal and external functions and more. This new edition, once complete, will provide a similarly useful desktop reference to its predecessor for most levels of professional user.

Because there's a lot more to be documented now, some of the theoretical stuff has been moved out to make way for the practical. This decision wasn't entirely due to pressure on the "real estate": during the past six years, as the capabilities of Firebird have been growing, the volume and quality of materials on the Web on these broader subjects has increased to the point where it no longer makes sense to try to cram them into a desktop companion.

The Boot Camp section at the front of the book now has a chapter on migrating databases from older versions to new. The original "Tools" part, covering the command-line utilities, has been split up and redistributed into appropriate chapters. Much of that material will now be found in the large, new section for database administrators, which covers the tools and facilities that didn't exist in V1.5: database monitoring, tracing and incremental backups, to name the obvious ones.

In the new edition, the SQL parts, with updated content, are more distinctly distributed according to function (definition, manipulation, procedural programming). The need for this slight change of approach arose from the variety of significant changes and improvements in the language areas over the time since The Firebird Book was first published. In Firebird 2+ you can run blocks of procedural SQL in dynamic queries and even (from V2.5 on) write a procedure that can connect to another database in its own transaction and behave a lot like a client application. Data Manipulation Language (DML) became a lot richer, too, supporting not just new operations but also new ways to do things with expressions and subsets.

This new version will be a comprehensive, practical guide to building highly stable, scalable database back-ends for your client/server and n-tier applications (including Web applications) using Firebird 2.5. Older versions of Firebird are not ignored, though. Where it matters, it is made clear at which point in Firebird's evolution the previously "undoable" becomes "doable" and how the same thing might be achieved with an older engine version.