In a project I am in need of a web-based tool to maintain master data in a Firebird database. Being pretty bad in writing web-based applications, I thought I will try a so-called CRUD (create/read/update/delete) web-framework, because I don't need anything fancy (yet), just to edit data in a few tables including user-friendly support for maintaining foreign-key relationships via drop-down boxes and such.

Although not being a Python Geek, I gave Django a try, and I must admit, I'm impressed on how fast one can build a simple web-based master data management application with it. It's pretty much defining an Django object model, which represents the tables, fields and relationships in your database. By enabling Django's auto-generated admin site/area based on this model, this is all you need to access, delete, insert and update data in your database.

The Django project does not officially support Firebird out-of-the box, but there is a Firebird Python driver and a small Django-Firebird backend project hosted here.

Django allows to integrate with legacy databases by reverse-engineering - in Django slang 'inspect' - a physical data model into Django's object model. The inspect functionality had a few bugs in the initial Django-Firebird backend. The good news are, I have fixed them and committed the changes into the SVN repository.

Possibly, I will write a bit about setting up Django with Firebird in a forthcoming blog item.

Thomas

Check out here.

As you might know, we are using Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), aka Kettle, as ETL tool in two of our DWH projects. In these projects, we also use Firebird as a relational backend for both OLTP and OLAP. In the PDI execution environment, an implemented ETL job can be triggered manually or scheduled at a given time or periodically with a given time interval. In all cases, the ETL job queries the OLTP database, checks if there are new records to move to the OLAP database and does its job, even if there were no new records to transfer. The actuality of the OLAP data depends on the chosen ETL job triggering approach.

Using Firebird, it's pretty obvious to change the whole triggering topic to an event-based approach. That said, the ETL job should kick in immediately, after a new record has been added in a particular table in the OLTP database which is relevant for the ETL job. Sadly, PDI does not have an Firebird event listener transformation step or job entry, but one can write custom plugins which are visible in the PDI IDE called "Spoon" and can be used when implementing an ETL job in a visual way. This is the route I went ...

Without going into detail how to write a custom plugin, the result looks like that:

* A new job entry "Firebird Event Listener" is shown in Spoon



* The job entry can be configured with the necessary data



* My entire ETL job looks like that now



Thanks to the excellent Firebird JDBC driver "Jaybird" and the ability to write custom plugins in PDI allows me to run the ETL job event-based now. No polling of the OLTP database and nearly accurate data in the OLAP database are the results of this move.

Great!

Thomas

More information is available here:
IB LogManager
ADSLogManager

I've made a ready-to-use TPC-H benchmark package for Firebird available for download.

Feel free to use this package to benchmark your Firebird environment in different server configurations, various page sizes, page buffers, ...

Please read the included readme.txt file. This shall have everything included for running the benchmark. I would highly appreciate if you could share your results as described in 6) in the readme.txt.

If you have any questions, doubts, feel free to get in touch with me either here or via email.

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to mention, that you need at least Firebird 2.1 to run this benchmark due to various syntactical pieces, which have been added in V2.1.

Regards,
Thomas