Philippe Makowski (IBPhoenix), the maintainer of Linux packages for Firebird and vice-president of Firebird Foundation, will present 2 topics at the Firebird Conference 2016:

Firebird SQL best practices
This talk will be devoted to the review of SQL features available in Firebird and that people often forget about their existence: Merge, Common Table Expression, Window Functions, etc. The special focus will be on how to emulate loose index scan using a recursive CTE. The term "loose index scan" is used in other databases for the operation of using a b-tree index to retrieve the distinct values of a column efficiently; rather than scanning all equal values of a key, as soon as a new value is found, restart the search by looking for a larger value. This is much faster when the index has many equal keys.

Managing Firebird with Ansible
This session will cover the topics listed below:
General information about configuration management and benefits of using configuration management tools Ansible overview and advantages of Ansible compared to other configuration management tools Basics of Ansible such as roles, tasks, handlers, modules, playbooks etc
Information about the Ansible Firebird module (a preview of this new module) and its usage with some examples. A playbook example using the Firebird module, covering managing Firebird Databases on AWS systems, RedHat, Debian, Mageia hosts, and Windows hosts.