Archive for April 2011

Adding boolean support to Firebird+DBX

Firebird is a great database, but it’s got one really irritating drawback: no native support for the boolean type.  The standard solution to this issue is to create a BOOLEAN domain as a special restricted version of a smallint, and then make your database driver output the correct type.

The first part is easy.  The second, not so much, if you want to use DBExpress.  This really should be handled internally as a special case inside the DBX driver.  Unfortunately neither Embarcadero nor Chau Chee Yang, maker of the alternative dbExpress Firebird driver, has released the source to their drivers, neither driver handles the BOOLEAN domain, and neither driver has any sort of callback/event handler that you can set up to intercept and modify the schema of a query result.  But I’m not gonna let a little thing like that stop me! Continue reading ‘Adding boolean support to Firebird+DBX’ »

The more things change…

Many years ago, back in 2000 or 2001, I forget the exact date but sometime in that time period, I ordered some books from Amazon and had them shipped by UPS.  The shipping date came and went, and my books didn’t arrive, so I called up UPS, tracking number in hand, and asked them where my shipment was.

After looking it up, the lady on the phone managed to track down the problem.  “We attempted to deliver it and couldn’t find your house.” Continue reading ‘The more things change…’ »