Setting up ColdFusion and Firebird

After a long struggle on Devshed forums I decided to try on my own, after all I know Firebird and don't see why it and ColdFusion can't play nice together ... infact they did, and easily.
Already having installed on my PC the database (Firebird 2.5 Alpha1) and a client tool (Flamerobin 0.8.6) I went for the server, downloading and installing the free developer version of ColdFusion 8 from Adobe's site.
Install went smooth and I just confirmed every default option but the drive D: in my case instead of the standard C:
After the install finished I logged into the admin console at the default address and opened the Server Setting Summary:

The important things are highlighted:

1. ColdFusion server version: 8,0,1,195765
2. Edition: Developer
3. Java VM Version: 1.6.0_04

With this infos at hand I went to Firebird site to download the appropriate driver version:

I chose the lates driver available, JayBird 2.1.6, for my JVM which is 1.6:


The driver downloads as a zip file, unzip it, extract the driver:

And place it along the other JDBC drivers in the ColdFusion server (the server config can tell you where they are), in my case D:\ColdFusion8\lib and restarted the server:


A quick check confirmed that the driver is in the server classpath:

Now I set up an alias for my Firebird database, just to have a simpler connectionstring, open up the file aliases.conf and add a row for your db, from now on you'll be able to refer to the alias instead of the full path to the db:


Don't forget to restart the Firebird server.

Ok, time to go back to ColdFusion and set up a Data Source:


Name it "LocalFirebird" and chose driver "other" from the drop down list, the click "Add".
After clicking "Add" a new form opens, asking for some other details:

Values are:

1. JDBC URL: jdbc:firebirdsql:127.0.0.1/3050:pippo (note the alias, no need for the full path)
   
2. Driver Class: org.firebirdsql.jdbc.FBDriver
3. Driver Name: JayBird
4. Username: your user, standard admin name is SYSDBA
   
5. Password: your password, standard password for SYSDBA is masterkey

Now click "Submit" and you'll go back to the Data Sources list, click "Verify all connection" and wait to see if an "OK" appears for the new connection:

After confirming the datasource is OK you can go on and put up a quick test page.

A Devshed forum use has put up a quick tutorial some time ago, kudos to him but it looks like it's a bit old (2003) and "poor in graphics" ;), you can find it here, I added some notes there which correspond to the content of this post.

The new MINI Clubman

I'm the happy owner of a New MINI ONE and had a chance to try the New MINI Cooper Clubman, which, apart being the bigger sister of my car, is also a second generation New Mini, which means new engine, new steering and some other things ... unfortunately not all of them are nice.
First of all, the new engine seems to be better than the old one, with a nice sound and good power.
The new steering is good, very light when parking and with a nice, heavy feeling at speed.
Car dynamics are great as usual, a pleasure to drive.
Now for the "not nice" things, rear visibility is close to zero:











The rear booth is bigger than the standard Mini (not too difficult ;)) but overall smaller than what I expected:











and the rear doors don't help when parked in tight quarters.










Other than that I didn't like some of the plastics used inside the car

and the awful "Goldrake" look of the central instruments, see it for
yourself:














Basically the Mini didn't change, so nice to drive that you'll forget it's price tag and everything else, but I must say that I like the first generation new Mini better than it's successor.

PostgreSQL - Firebird comparison

Google led me to a comparison sheet about PostgreSQL and Firebird by AMSoftwareDesign, as it looks a bit outdated I decided to add some infos about the latest Firebird release, see it in action:

	PostgreSQL vs Firebird feature comparison
Feature	PostgreSQL 8.2.x	Firebird 2.0.x	Firebird 2.5 Alpha
MVCC	Yes	Yes	Yes
Row level Locking Available	Yes	Yes	Yes
Max Database Size	Unlimited*	Unlimited*	Unlimited*
Max table Size	32 TB	~32 TB	~32 TB
Max Row Size	1.6 TB	64 KB	65 KB
Max Rows per Table	Unlimited*	> 16 Billion	> 16 Billion
Max Columns Per Table	50 - 1600 depending on column types	Depends on data types used.	Depends on data types used.
Max Indexes Per Table	Unlimited*	65,535	66,535
Max SQL statement size	Unlimited*	64kb	64kb
Multi Threaded Architecture Available?	No (see "Features we do NOT want" in the TODO list)	Yes (super server) and No (classic server)	Yes (super server), architectures will be unified with full SMP support in 3.0
Ability to re-order table columns without re-creating	No	Yes	Yes
Stores Transaction Information in same file as data	No	Yes	Yes
Auto Increment Columns	Yes (serial type that uses sequences)	Yes (must use a generator and a trigger)	Yes (must use a generator and a trigger)
True Boolean column type	Yes	No	No
Table Inheritance	Yes	No	No
Domains	Yes	Yes	Yes
Table Partitioning	Yes (basic)	No	No
Updateable Views	No (workaround available via rules system)	Yes	Yes
Event/Notification System	Yes	Yes	Yes
Temporary Tables	Yes	No	Yes
Rich Built in Functions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multi Lang Stored Procedures	Yes (PLPGSQL,PLPerl,PlJava etc)	No	No (support for Java stored procedures is scheduled for 3.0)
Compiled External Function (UDF) Support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Exception handling in stored procedures	Yes	Yes	Yes
2 Phased Commit	Yes	Yes	Yes
Native SSL support	Yes	No	No
Multiple auth methods (i.e. LDAP)	Yes	No	Yes (database auth or integrated windows auth)
Compound Indexes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Unique Indexes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Partial Indexes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Functional Indexes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multiple Index Storage Types	Yes (btree,hash etc)	No	No
Point in Time Recovery	Yes	No	No
Schema Support	Yes	No	No
Conforms to ANSI-SQL 92/99	Yes	Yes	Yes
Limit/Offset support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create user defined types	Yes	No	No
Create user defined operators	Yes	No	No
Create user defined Aggregates	Yes	No	No
Log Shipping (for Point In Time Recovery and Log Shipping)	Partial	No	No
Write ahead logging	Yes	No	No
Tablespaces	Yes	No	No
Save Points	Yes	Yes	Yes
Open Source Async Replication	Yes (Slony )	No (Commercial solutions available. Database shadowing is also present.)	No (Commercial solutions available. Database shadowing is also present.)
Online/Hot Backups	Yes	Yes	Yes
File System based backups possible	Yes (Postmaster must be stopped)	Yes	Yes
Require backup/restore to compact	No	Yes	Yes
Fully ACID Compliant	Yes	Yes	Yes
Native Win32 Port	Yes	Yes	Yes
Text/Memo field type	Yes	Yes	Yes
BLOB support	Yes (limited to the max field size of 1 GB)	Yes (Can be up to 32GB)	Yes (Can be up to 32GB)
UTF8 support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Define charactersets/collations per database (default)	Partial (PostgreSQL can also define a characterset for the entire database cluster during the initdb process, it is not recommend to run databases in different encodings than the encoding chosen at initdb time)	Yes	Yes
Define charactersets and collations on a per column level	No	Yes	Yes
Foreign Keys	Yes	Yes	Yes
Check Constraints	Yes	Yes	Yes
Unique Constraints	Yes	Yes	Yes
Not Null Constraints	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multiple Transaction Isolation levels	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fully relational System Catalogs	Yes	Yes	Yes
Information Schema	Yes	No (no schema support) but equivalent system tables	No (no schema support) but equivalent system tables
Native GIS support via GIST or other native means	Yes (PostGIS )	No	No
Open Source Full Text Search	Yes	No	No
Use POSIX Regular Expressions in queries	Yes	No	Yes, through standard predicate SIMILAR TO
Database Monitoring	Yes	No	Yes, through system tables and triggers
Ability to query databases on other servers local or remote.	Yes (Dblink )	No	Yes (through EXECUTE STATEMENT)
Ability to query other databases	Yes (DBI-Link ,DBLink-TDS )	No	No
Read Only Databases	No	Yes	Yes
Regular Version Updates	Yes	Yes	Yes
* Unlimited but still restricted by system resources.

Has them all

A question that pops up frequently on Devshed forums is "How can I get all products that are available in Red and Green colors?" or "How can I find out which customers bought this book and that CD?", solution is simple and I'll provide an example here, it can be made more complicate at your option, but it all boils down to a where and an having condition.
Say we have a table that lists all products and the colors in which those products are available:

CREATE TABLE PRODUCT_COLORS(
  PRODUCT_CODE CHAR(5) NOT NULL,
  COLOR_CODE CHAR(1) NOT NULL,
  CONSTRAINT PRODUCT_COLORS_PK PRIMARY KEY (PRODUCT_CODE,COLOR_CODE)
); 

Data looks like:

Code:

XXXXX                R
XXXXX                B
YYYYY                Y
YYYYY                G
ZZZZZ                G
ZZZZZ                R   

First column is the product code, second column is the color code.
Say we want to know which products are available in G(reen) and R(ed), the query is simple, we'll list all products which do have the Red or Green option and then filter out all those that don't have both, getting the desired result (in this case product 'ZZZZZ')
See it in action:

SELECT a.PRODUCT_CODE
FROM PRODUCT_COLORS a
WHERE a.COLOR_CODE IN ('R', 'G')
GROUP BY a.PRODUCT_CODE
HAVING COUNT(a.PRODUCT_CODE) = 2 

See where I implemented the two conditions? One in the where clause and the second pass to filter out all products which don't have both in the having clause.
Example is built on Firebird, but should work in MySQL, PostgreSQL or any other mainstream database too.

Another great new feature of Firebird 2.5

Other than CREATE USER something really valuable has been added, the ability to query other databases.
Using a table structure like my previous post what follows is an example of a query running on an external database:

SET TERM ^ ;
CREATE PROCEDURE GET_MASTER_PROD_ALL_EXT
RETURNS (
P_CODE Char(5),
I_ENABLED Char(1),
P_DESCR Varchar(50) )
AS
declare variable qry varchar(5000);
  BEGIN
qry = 'SELECT pm.PRODUCT_CODE, pm.IS_ENABLED, pm.PRODUCT_DESCR
    FROM product_master pm';
EXECUTE STATEMENT qry  ON EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE 'localhost:c:\pippo2.fdb'
AS USER 'sysdba' PASSWORD 'masterkey'
INTO :p_code, :i_enabled, :p_descr;
    SUSPEND;
  END^
SET TERM ; ^

The trick is the ON EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE clause, which allows you to specify a target database ("localhost:c:\pippo2.fdb" in my case, generally that's time to start using aliases) and the user/password to be used
As you can see , no "dblinks" yet, but of course you can embed it into a view and join it (the stored proc or the view) with other local or remote objects.
The querystring can also be built dynamically passing parameters.
Isn't it great?

Controlling user access to data

A straight and simple question on Devshed prompted me to post this example about using updateable views to limit the ability of users to read and manipulate data both horizontally and vertically.
Before you ask, with "horizontally" I mean restricting access to a subset of rows in a table, with "vertically" I mean restricting access to a subset of columns in a table.
See this scenario, a table holding product data, named product_master and two users, one with full access and another one which we want to limit.
Specifically we want to allow this second user to see only products flagged as "enabled" (horizontal limitation, only a subset of rows) and, for those products, we want to be shure that he can only change (update) the product description.
How can we achieve this?
With a mix of grant management and updateable views, let's see this setup in action:
Structure for table product_master is:

CREATE TABLE PRODUCT_MASTER(
  PRODUCT_CODE CHAR(5) NOT NULL,
  IS_ENABLED CHAR(1),
  PRODUCT_DESCR Varchar(50),
  CONSTRAINT PRODUCT_MASTER_PK PRIMARY KEY (PRODUCT_CODE)
);
 
GRANT DELETE, INSERT, REFERENCES, SELECT, UPDATE
 ON PRODUCT_MASTER TO SYSDBA WITH GRANT OPTION; 

As you can see only sysdba has access to this table, nothing is granted to user pippo or public role.
We said that pippo should be able to update the product description, so I'll give him appropriate grants for this:

GRANT UPDATE ON PRODUCT_MASTER TO PIPPO; 

Ok, right now pippo can update the product table, then comes the hard part, allowing him to see and update only enabled products, those rows of the product master table that have the enabled field set to 'Y'.

This will be accomplished with an updateable view and proper grants, let's see it in action:

CREATE VIEW ENABLED_PRODUCTS (PRODUCT_CODE, PRODUCT_DESCR)AS  
/* write select statement here */ 
SELECT pm.PRODUCT_CODE, pm.PRODUCT_DESCR 
FROM product_master pm 
WHERE IS_ENABLED = 'Y' 
WITH CHECK OPTION; 

The two important things here are the where condition in the select and the "with check option" clause.
The related grants to complete the magic are:

GRANT SELECT, UPDATE ON ENABLED_PRODUCTS TO PIPPO;
 
GRANT DELETE, INSERT, REFERENCES, SELECT, UPDATE
 ON ENABLED_PRODUCTS TO SYSDBA WITH GRANT OPTION; 

Hope this helps