Dear colleagues!

I am happy to present to you the first issue of “The InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine”. It has been a long time since the initial idea for such a magazine was born, and now you are reading the first issue.

Why “InterBase and Firebird”

I think the “editor’s note” is the right place to answer some obvious questions about a newborn magazine. First of all, why does its title contain both “InterBase” and “Firebird”? Some newbies and gurus of InterBase and Firebird insist that they are different products - and I completely agree. They are different, but people who use them are the same. Development approaches, problems and techniques are almost always the same.

Of course, InterBase and Firebird are different but it is not the same kind of difference as between Oracle and MS SQL - they are different like brothers.

Who need our magazine

You sometimes hear the opinion that “InterBase is not a serious DBMS” and “Firebird? What’s this?” And it is a hardly known fact that the size of our community is close to the community size of such monsters as Oracle and MS SQL. Despite the fact that Oracle and Microsoft command huge PR-budgets, we are very well positioned in this competition. And I am sure that there is huge hidden potential in our community.

Now the situation is changing. We have got at least one great book about Firebird, we have annual conference events, and now we have got our own magazine - just like other big players. I hope that our magazine will be useful and interesting for all people who work with InterBase and Firebird - as DBAs, as developers or even as project managers. We are concentrating on “all times greatest hits” problems and will try to make this magazine not a one-off reading, but a long-play interesting novel that makes for some good reaing a number of times. Also in future issues we will pay attention to community events like BorCon and the Firebird Conference.

In this issue

Ok, what do we have in this issue? The first and largest article “Inside Savepoints” by Dmitri Yemanov is devote to the internal details of server savepoints. Explicit savepoints are a rather recent improvement in both InterBase and Firebird, and I think it will be very interesting for all readers to know nittygritty details of their functioning. Another hot article is “Using Embedded User Authentication in InterBase 7.5″ by Dmitri Kouzmenko. We have all been waiting for this feature for a long time, and I suppose we won’t be disappointed.

“Working with temporary tables in InterBase 7.5″ is also very interesting. To my mind, adding user temporary tables is the most important recent improvement of InterBase so every developer should know its details. And I think many InterBase and Firebird developers came across the most annoying error - error 10054. The article of Vasily Ovchinnikov is devoted to practical ways to avoid 10054 errors.

Of course, this is not all of it in this issue - please feel invited to read on.

We need your feedback

This is the first issue of “The Interbase and Firebird Developer Magazine”. We have got plenty of ideas for the following issues and will try to make “The Interbase and Firebird Developer Magazine” the best database developer magazine around. And the most important thing we would like to know is your opinion and your thoughts about our work. Please do not hesitate to contact us: readers@ibdeveloper.com

Sincerely yours,

Alexey Kovyazin.

Chief Editor