Steve, All,

s> I'd hate to see this excellent publicity opportunity wasted. I'm sure I'm not
s> the most qualified of the members of this list to do a technical article on
s> using Firebird, but I'd consider it if nobody else wants to. I don't have much
s> experience with events, but I've done some custom UDFs. The ability to add user
s> defined functions is pretty unique to Interbase/Firebird, isn't it?

Mmm... I think it's pretty common, instead. At least I have seen it done in
Oracle and MS SQL Server. I haven't seen a callback implementation as
slick as Firebird events elsewhere, though. But I don't have anything
very interesting to say about events either.

What I have is I think pretty unique, but the problems I
am solving don't qualify as common. I am using Firebird embedded as a
high-performance back-end for a multithreaded server which has the
role of collecting statistical information from the desktops of a call
center. Hundreds of transactions per second is the likely load in
production (I have a pool of a hundred threads and they're usually all
running in the test environment). Embedding the server cuts access
time to the data by about 50%, and this is the fastest server of the
family (the others use Oracle via OCI or Oracle*Net, but don't get
close to the speed of Fb embedded even on local connections). But,
apart from the fact that this use case looks a bit exotic if not
awkward, everything is implemented in Delphi for Win32 (not even .NET)
- not exactly the kind of tool DDJ spends tons of pages upon. And,
since it's contract work, I'm not sure how much of the code I would be
allowed to disclose...

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
mailto:nandod@...