All,

I thought it would be appropriate to give a brief report of my participation at the Firebird Conference this year in Prague . As usual, it was a tremendously enjoyable time visiting with those who came to attend the Conference. I was asked several great questions and had a lot of in depth discussion about IB Objects and Firebird. There is also the really fun times we have hanging out at restaurants and then as many pubs as it takes to have somewhere to continue our conversations and build our friendships.

I gave two sessions this year. One of them focused on IB Objects and a demonstration of some of its key features. In addition to the general basics, I went into some detail on the Full Text Search, Replication and Service Application tools. The other talk I gave was specifically geared towards optimizing datasets and transactions in your application. I covered in depth some very little known and/or understood aspects of how your queries affect your transactions. I also went into some depth on the pros and cons of direct updates vs. using cached updates. We talked about record locking, conflict resolution and how to avoid hotspots that give you deadlocks without also making your data vulnerable to update contention that escapes detection.

Since returning home I have realized just how important this second session's material is and so I have decided to write up a more detailed paper accompanying a tutorial application so that everyone can have access to this information. And, in the process of writing this paper, I have also been spurred on to make some core improvements that will greatly assist in producing clean, efficient and high performing applications. This will be included with the Firebird Conference materials from the sessions as well as be included in the next sub-release of IB Objects itself. I will put it in the ibo5\docs sub-folder.

It was great to see many IB Objects customers in attendance this year and I look forward to future opportunities to rub shoulders with those of you who make it possible for me to derive my primary income from this product.

I would also like to report that I have been spending a tremendous amount of time working on IBO 6. I have not said a lot about my efforts here publicly because it is still a bit early on to make any solid announcements as to when it will be ready for beta testing. That kind of remains the case, but, I just want to say that much progress has been made in its major objectives.

Also, I'd like to put in a reminder to go to CPS - Welcome and update your subscriptions so that you will be able to immediately download this new and exciting piece of documentation when the next sub-release comes out.

Thanks!

Jason Wharton
IBObjects Home Page