Upgrading Plastic SCM to Firebird Server

When you install Plastic SCM on Window it will work with an embedded Firebird database. Firebird is very good in terms of performance for small teams, but sometimes you will need to upgrade to something faster, specially if you detect some operations are slow. Let's see how to do a very easy move: set up a Firebird server instead of an embedded one.

Motivation

If you see your update operation is too slow... then more often than not you're experiencing a slow backend. Sometimes it can also be due to the disk IO performance so do a quick test: go to your workspace and type:

cm update . --timer --stats --noparallel

And check the "SolveSelector" line. If it's bigger than, let's say, 3-5 seconds and your server is on the LAN... you've a perf issue!

Installing Firebird

At the time of writing this we just recommend to go for Firebird 2.1.3, so go to this page and download it: http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=engine_213. Installing it is just a matter of a few clicks.

Setting up Plastic to use a Firebird server

Really easy: stop the plastic service and then create a db.conf file on the server's directory location with the following contents:

(Remember: the entire "connection string" in a single line!!!!)

<DbConfig>
  <ProviderName>firebird</ProviderName>
  <ConnectionString>ServerType=0;User=SYSDBA;
      Password=masterkey;Database={0};Pooling=true;
      connection lifetime=60;Charset=UNICODE_FSS;
  </ConnectionString>
  <DatabasePath></DatabasePath>

</DbConfig>

Restart the Plastic server and you're done!