The ITDevCon conference, an European Delphi conference in Verona/Italy is taking place in October 25/26 2012. Upscene Productions is a Media Sponsor of this event. Check it out here: http://www.itdevcon.it

Call for paper deadline is July 30, 2012. We haven't decided to submit something, but if you are interested in something Firebird-related, let me know.

That's positive feedback I really appreciate. It just took a few minutes for a customer to pin down and improve some frequently executed slow queries against a Firebird 2.5 database with the help of the new Firebird 2.5 Trace API and FB TraceManager. So, FB TraceManager license cost paid off very quickly.

You don't know what I'm talking about? Check out the FB TraceManager product page HERE.

Something totally technical unrelated ...

Being a semi-professional tennis player in my young years and still enjoy the game on a higher-level myself these days, I must admit, I was a bit emotional, when King Roger Federer won his 7th championship title in holy Wimbledon (his "living room") yesterday on July 8th, 2012.

This date is definitely something for the tennis history books, because:

* He won his 7th title in Wimbledon, exactly the same number as his idol Pistol Pete Sampras, which he beat in Wimbledon in 2001 in a fabulous match, when they all played Serve&Volley (check out Youtube). *g*

* He is now the number one of the world ranking again, which means being 286 (!) weeks on top of the world ranking in his career, equally to, again, Pete Sampras. Most of the people didn't expect that he is able to get back to the top again in an area with Djokovic, Nadal etc.

* This is his 17th Grand Slam tournament victory, leading this statistic

* This all at an age of 30 years, which is quite unusual in Tennis, being that successful in playing single, especially these days, when all players hit the ball that hard and when all are in such an excellent physical shape.

* Not to forget, he has his own family business with his wife Mirka and their twins, playing a very important role in the background

Roger, great moments, great emotions. Thank you very much. Well deserved! And, good luck for Olympia, again in Wimbledon!

Greetings from Austria.

I like virtualization. One of the greatest things for developers, testers etc. Couldn't live without it anymore. Won't go into details what e.g. VMWare Desktop Edition offers. But, this time, I was in trouble and VMWare helped me a lot.

I have a Firebird consulting gig tomorrow and as you can imagine, taking my laptop with me makes sense (lot of Firebird related stuff ready to go ...), but my current laptop gives me troubles with random crashes etc., thus not much fun if this will happen at the customer site, possibly several times. And, I'm in a rush. So, I got the idea to create a VMWare image via the "VMWare vCenter Converter Standalone" tool from the physical machine (my laptop). In hope, that my laptop won't crash during the creation process.

It didn't, so I now have an identical copy of my laptop system partition as a VMWare image, which I simply can take with me on an external HDD and with VMWare Player at the customer site, I'm ready to go.

GREAT stuff. Again, GREAT stuff.

Have a nice weekend.

If you are seeking for someone with experienced Firebird and/or Delphi knowledge, feel free to get in touch with me at "ts AT iblogmanager DOT com" (remove the obvious parts).

Firebird services can include:
- Server and database configuration tuning
- Performance tuning
- Review of your development
- Tips and tricks
- etc.

From previous Firebird server, database and performance tuning consulting gigs, based on a questionary, usually we can work out a solid environment with various settings/optimization tasks in a few hours.