Chapter 1: Introduction

The Firebird 1.5 distribution kit installs a number of useful utility programs to assist in the running of your Firebird server & databases. This book introduces you to the various utilities, some of which are more useful than others.

The utilities can all be found in the /bin directory (or \bin folder on Windows) under the Firebird installation root. On Linux the utilities can be found in /opt/firebird/bin while on Windows, the default location is c:\program files\firebird\firebird_1_5\bin.

FB_LOCK_PRINT is the utility which prints out details of the internal database lock page.
GBAK is the database backup & restore utility. It also allows various parameters internal to the database to be changed.
GDEF is a metadata utility which was removed from Interbase 4.0 and returned in the Open Source version 6. GDEF is probably redundant.
GFIX allows attempts to fix corrupted databases, starting and stopping of databases, resolving 'in limbo' transactions between multiple database, changing the number of page buffers and so on.
GPRE is the pre-processor which converts source code, which can be written in a number of languages, containing various embedded SQL 'pseudo code' into correctly formatted calls to the Firebird engine.
GSEC is the security database manipulation utility. It allows the DBA (or any privileged user) the ability to maintain user accounts for various Firebird databases. Using various options, users can be added, amended or deleted from the security database.
GSPLIT is a filter which allows the limitations on maximum file sizes, found on some operating systems, to be avoided when creating backups of large databases. This utility is supplied on Windows only and, unfortunately, seems not to work. Luckily, GBAK allows backup files to be split into multiple parts, so GSPLIT is not required. On Unix systems there are suitable operating system utilities that can be used instead of GSPLIT, if required.
GSTAT allows the Firebird administrator the ability to gather statistics about the general health and utilisation of various parts of the database.
ISQL is the interactive utility that allows ad-hoc queries to be run against a Firebird database. It is console based - as are many of the utilities - and is supplied with all distributions of Firebird. ISQL is usually the best place to try out your scripts and commands in the first instance.
QLI is the original Query Language Interpreter which was removed from Interbase 4.0 but returned in Interbase 6.0 because of the decision to Open Source Interbase.
There are also various shell scripts installed under Linux and other Unix systems.

Note

This book is a work in progress. Each chapter details a separate utility and as each one is completed to my satisfaction, I shall add it to the CVS repository where it will be available for download. In this manner, there will be a slow and gradual build up of hopefully useful manuals.