Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2006 from Firebird Team!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2006 from Firebird Team!
by Marina Novikova

Marina Novikova: What do you think were the greatest FB project achievements in 2005 in general?

Paul Beach: Too many to list. I appreciate many things from large achievements like new releases of Firebird, and the associated drivers, to small achievements
like improved documentation. To me all are great. Each small thing is another major step forward.

Roman Rokytskyy: Not sure whether this can be called 2005 achievement, since it started in 2004 (or even in 2003), but on the other hand the public announcements did happen in 2005 - SAS had chosen Firebird among other databases for one of their core components. This confirmed that we are playing in the top league.
Also we should mention Evans Data Survey that put Firebird on the 2nd place among the OpenSource databases.
And check the page hits count on the firebirdsql.org site: in 2004 it was max. 500,000 hits per month, in 2005 we have 3 mio and more - almost 10 times more.

Arno Brinkman: When looking back over the year 2005 we have reach a lot of achievements and you'll see this in the Firebird 2.0 release notes. They are all very great achievements, but in general i would say the ODS, INTL and security changes.

Marina Novikova: Who has done his best to push the project forward? Why?

Paul Beach: I don't think it would be fair to name names, everybody who is actively involved in the project contributes something in his or her own way. I am just pleased that we have so many active contributors in so many different areas, not just core development, but documentation, QA and even guerilla marketing. The whole is always a greater sum than its constuent parts.

Roman Rokytskyy: Our community. We see much more interest to the project this year compared to the previous ones. And those people have to defend their decision to use Firebird in their companies.

Also we need to say "thank you" to Oracle management, first of all for buying the INNODB right at the time of MySQL 5.0 release, but also for
overpricing their servers making people to start looking for better alternatives.

Arno Brinkman: Paul Beach and Dmitry Yemanov. Dmitry as project leader keeping some presure of finishing features and fixing bugs. While Paul Beach tried to keep things in sync with Vulcan and set out the Roadmap with Dmitry.

Marina Novikova: What could be done better (Is it possible to improve this in 2006)?

Paul Beach: Keeping to timetables for releases? It would be nice, but I can't see it happening. This is an open source project after all, and we don't release
software until we are pretty sure thats its as good as we can get it. However the improvement of QA and larger beta testing should help significantly.

Roman Rokytskyy: When we look back, there are always things that could be improved. The most demanding Firebird feature is good documentation. Currently we have only Helen's book, but we need also a replacement for the old InterBase documentation. As far as I know, situation will change next year.

Arno Brinkman: We really need to improve the network protocol so that it decreases the time needed for large data fetches. This is one of the bottlenecks for speed at the moment. Hoping this can be achieved in the end of 2006.
Also the internally SQL handling could be integrated more which would definitly speed up the prepare time. Further more limits needs to be removed and this requires a new ODS version, but i'm afraid not double in 2006. Time will show.

Marina Novikova: If you remember the horoscopes, the symbol of year 2006 is a dog. Will Firebird be a lucky dog? Why?

Paul Beach: If the project continues to grow and prosper in the way that it has to date, then I will consider that to be lucky enough.

Roman Rokytskyy: Didn't you know that it is not simply year of the Dog but a year of "Red Fire Dog"? And I really think that dog is also called Sparky. :-)

Arno Brinkman: Yes i think so, 2006 will be the year were FB2.0, Vulcan and the merger FB3.0 will be released. Unless that FB3.0 will become "only" a merge between Vulcan and FB2.0 with some extra features it's an importand step in the future for Firebird.

Marina Novikova: What was your most important contribution to Firebird in 2005?

Paul Beach: I have no idea, I will let someone else answer that.

Roman Rokytskyy: It would be not very polite to advertise personal contributions here. We are a team and each member does his best to move the project forward.
Whether we succeed or not one can judge from the overall project success, but not from the opinions of single contributors.

Arno Brinkman: Both the new index structure as the optimizer improvements i see as the most importand contribution to the project. The new index structure speed up index lookup in general and has a better separation between NULLs and values. With that the optimizer is able to do more with conjunctions.

Marina Novikova: If you were Santa Claus, what present would you give to Sparky and each member of the Team (any preferences)?

Paul Beach: To Sparky, nothing, its just an inanimate stuffed toy:-) to everybody else whatever hardware and software they need to continue doing what they are currently doing now but better.

Roman Rokytskyy: Definitely health, since working on the project can't be healthy by definition, just check the time when Dmitry or Vlad post their emails to the
newsgroups/mailing lists. And Helen and Ann seem to "happily" live without sleeping at all.
Also I would not mind to have a cloning machine, then I would clone few copies of me, one would go to work and earn money, other would be able to code all the ideas I have, another one would create documentation, fourth would monitor mailing lists, fifth finally could take care of the home and family, sixth... Ahh... I think 20 copies should be ok :-)
And definitely more showers. As Jim Starkey has once noticed, all good ideas come into the head in the shower. We should think about making this procedure compulsory for all project members at least two times a day.

Arno Brinkman: Give Sparky a free world to spread the wings and fly everywhere, together with unlimited food for energy. Each member deserves a good vacation and afterwards a lot of time to spend on the project :-)

Marina Novikova: How are you going to celebrate Christmas and New Year's Eve?

Paul Beach: Quietly with my wife and a decent bottle of wine.

Roman Rokytskyy: Christmas and New Year I will definitely celebrate with my family, most likely banned from the Internet, mailing lists, etc.

Arno Brinkman: We will celebrate Christmas and New Year with our families. There's nothing special i would like to see under the X-mas tree, but i wouldn't mind finding a 8-way processor box with a huge memory capacity ;-)

Marina Novikova: What would/would not you like to see under the X-mas tree?

Paul Beach: Would: What Xmas tree? I don't bother putting one up, as the cats tend to try and hang themselves from it in an attempt to remove all the decorations.
Not: Bill Gates.

Marina Novikova: When will you start working on Firebird in 2006 (will you have long NY vacations or not)?

Paul Beach: No vacations, so I will probably be checking on email all through the holidays.

Roman Rokytskyy: Having said all that above I doubt I will stop thinking about Firebird even in the Sylvester night... I will just be banned from the keyboard, but that is not bad at all - one needs to think about next steps few times a year. :)

Arno Brinkman: I don't have any vacations planned in the begin of 2006, so i can start quickly when time permits.

Marina Novikova: That's the place for your NY wishes to the Firebird community: ...

Paul Beach: I would like to wish everyone a happy christmas and a prosperous new year, and also hope that Firebird continues to go from strength to strength.

Roman Rokytskyy: Well... as I already said, I wish everybody that is somehow involved with Firebird, those who develop it and those who use it, health and good mood on the first place. New year 2006 promises to be very interesting for us - we will see new releases, new horizons will open to us. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Arno Brinkman: I wish everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year.

P.S. This inteview was also published in 3d issue of "The InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine"