It's nice to hear that Joel Spolsky is considering a Firebird support in future releases of FogBugz.

Via Firebird Weekly News.

Firebird ADO.NET Provider 1.7 Release Candidate 3 is available:

• Download
• Release notes

Andrea Sansottera has ported the Data Access application block from Enterprise Library to Firebird:

• Homepage and download
• Enterprise Library [MSDN]

Via Firebird Weekly News.

One of the factors that affect database performance is the disk access. You can improve it by various means:

• Improve the physical performance of the disk (using a quicker drive, RAID)
• Splitting a large database over several physical disks
• Minimizing the need to access the disk

You can minimize the need to access the disk basically by two means:

• Using a bigger cache (useful especially for repeated SELECTs)
• Increasing a database page size

When the database server reads or writes data it always works with fixed blocks of data - these are called pages. By increasing the page size you increase the size of a block that is read/written in one disk operation.

Firebird supports the following page sizes:

• 1024 B (1 kB) - default
• 2048 B (2 kB)
• 4096 B (4 kB)
• 8192 B (8 kB)
• 16384 B (16 kB)

In most cases, increasing a page size to 4096 B gives you a 30% performance increase. But you should do your own benchmarks to find out the right value.

The page size can't be changed at runtime. There are only two ways to set it:

• When creating a new database (CREATE DATABASE...)
• When restoring a database from backup (using gbak tool or using ADO.NET Service API - see FbBackup and FbRestore)