FBCon 10 – “live” feed
The conference is starting today. I’ll write here during the days about what’s going on. Also check Twitter with hashtag #FBCon10 for most recent quick messages.
Day 1:
Well, I was not so active posting new content during the day, mainly because I had no connection, so I was only tweeting. Right now we’re slowly approaching the end of first day. All the sessions we’re interesting so far.
Vlad’s about new features in SQL was a good summary of all the pieces of information you collect throughout the year. The next session from Holger about character set was good as well. Though as person from .NET world my databases are alway UTF8, so I don’t care too much. But I understand, that understanding how Firebird works with different characters set is crucial to know, and not only for migrating i.e. legacy database to UTF8 or something like that. Than was my session. Most interesting, of course. 😉 Well, not a lot of .NET people, only 4 attended. 😃 Frank’s session (actually two) about trees in database was a great, if you’re not familiar about some basic concepts of storing trees and querying these. Especially if you are (were) not familiar with recursive CTEs (which I’m using a lot).
Right now the last session of day, Holger’s about UDFs and 32bit & 64bit and Lazarus and FreePascal, is slowly starting. As I’m not using UDFs, because I’m relying strongly on built-in functions (and you can’t, right now, write these in managed code 😉), I’ll just check what are the challenges and problems today with it.
Day 2:
Connection is today little bit better, so I can post something. We’re now in the middle (slowly approaching) of the second day. So far I’ve seen the Vlad’s presentation about ODS improvements in Firebird 3. Although it’s probably not going affect my databases so much, it’s nice to hear somebody explaining the internals as it brings you more complete view on the topic. Then we have seen some nice features of IBExpert tools from Holger. Some are really advanced. And right now I’m sitting on session about Firebird performance comparison and it’s a nice summary of different stuff you can buy and/or do to make (or not) make your database(s) running faster. In the other room Roman is doing session, but as there was some swapping, I don’t know the name 😃.
Dammit. My session is now done, but my computer froze while switching virtual machines. :-\ At that time I really appreciated my effort to keep my system clean and of course my SSD. In under two minutes I was back. At least there was lot more people visiting my session compared to yesterday.
We’re slowly approaching the end of the end of the day 2, only one session comparing Firebird 2.5 architectures is left. Because I’m using 2.5 version for more than a year, I’m confident I know all the important differences. 😉 Again, I’m looking to the after-dinner talks, because you’ll learn a lot of stuff (not only Firebird or databases related).
Day 3:
The final day, day 3, is now over. That means also the conference is over. Surprisingly this day was most interesting (related to session topics) for me. This first session was about the Firebird future features from Dmitry (presented by Vlad). Then Thomas’ about audit and trace. The trace is in fact, from using it perspective simple, but a lot of people might not know about it. Roman has a similar session about RIA and Java+Firebird (mine was OData+Firebird), so I was able to see how it’s done in Java world. The IBEBlock language session, well I was surprised how much functions you have available there, some of these really advanced and you can still use it as DLL and scripting. My, already mentioned, OData+Firebird session was, as I was kind of expecting after previous days, based at least on the peoples elaboration at the Q&A, interesting for them as well (and everything was working smoothly 😉). And that’s pretty much it, last day of conference.
This year, IBExpert team did again great job with organization. Not only conference, but also all the stuff around it (except the internet connection, which was really bad). As a speaker I was in particular pleased with the recording of session. No software hassle, just some frictionless hardware box recording directly from VGA between notebook and projector.
During evening events we did some Mercedes Benz cars driving, as the conference was in their customer center and of course exchanged a lot words about Firebird, topics realted to Firebird, but also absolutely unrelated topics. Not a lot of .NET people, only few, but the others were little bit interested about the .NET world.
The next one is already planned for the beginning of 2012 (of course if somebody will not do one sooner). Looking forward to it already.
