FirebirdSQL 2.0 Release

By: JF

The Firebird Project today officially releases the much-anticipated version 2.0 of its open source Firebird relational database software during the opening session of the fourth international Firebird Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

Firebird 2.0 is the happy culmination of more than two years' efforts from a broad-ranging, truly international community of dedicated developers and supporters. It brings with it a large collection of long-awaited enhancements that significantly improve performance, security and support for international languages and realise some desirable new SQL language features. Under the surface, it also provides a much more robust code platform from which the re-architecting planned for Firebird 3.0 is proceeding.

Features of the release include:

• A thorough reworking of indexing to ramp up performance and minimise bottlenecks in searching and matching
• Several limitations inherited from the legacy code have now gone, such as the 252-byte limit on index size and the 30 Gb limit on table size.
• A new interface for plugging in international character sets, including enhanced Unicode support, along with a number of new and corrected collations
• 64-bit platform support with released binaries available for AMD64 and Intel EM64T on Linux. Windows 64-bit builds are ready for testing and will follow in a sub-release
• An intense makeover of server security, including beefed-up password encryption and inbuilt protection for brute-force attack
• Support for SQL200x derived tables, including multi-level nesting and joining of subqueries
• EXECUTE BLOCK syntax to enable blocks of procedural SQL (PSQL) to be executed in dynamic SQL statements
• Explicit cursors in PSQL, also available inside EXECUTE BLOCK statements
• Optional WAIT lock conflict timeout, available as both a SET TRANSACTION argument and as a transaction parameter in the API
• All-new incremental backup capability
• Complete re-architecting of "serverless" local connection protocol on Windows to eliminate the inherent instability of the legacy IPServer protocol
• Fully completed implementation of the Services API on all platforms