Author: Cantu

I'm the owner of the www.Firebase.com.br site and the author of the books Firebird Essencial, Firebird 2 and Migration Guide to Firebird 3. Loving Firebird even before it was born!

Firebird 4 alpha

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Firebird Project announces the first Alpha release of Firebird 4.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing.

This Alpha release arrives with an early preview of the features and improvements currently under development by the Firebird development team, as well as with countless bugfixes. Our users are appreciated giving it a try and providing feedback to this mailing list. Apparent bugs can be reported directly to the bugtracker.

Alpha releases are not encouraged for production usage or any other goals that require a stable system. They are, however, recommended for those users who want to help in identifying issues and bottlenecks thus allowing to progress faster through the Beta/RC stages towards the final release.

Please read the Release Notes carefully before installing and testing this Alpha release.

Download page:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-4-0-0-alpha1/

Release Notes:
http://web.firebirdsql.org/downloads/prerelease/v40alpha1/Firebird-4.0.0_Alpha1-ReleaseNotes.pdf

—
Dmitry Yemanov

Jaybird 3.0.1 released

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The Firebird JDBC team is happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.1.

Jaybird 3.0.1 contains the following fixes and changes:

  • Fixed: FBTraceManager.loadConfigurationFromFile strips line breaks (JDBC-493)
  • Fixed: FBDatabaseMetaData.getTables does not list tables where rdb$relation_type is null (JDBC-494)
  • Improvement: Character sets are now initialized lazily (JDBC-495)
  • Fixed: Memory leak caused by retaining blob handles until connection close (JDBC-497)

See the Jaybird 3.0.1 release notes for more information. Jaybird 3.0.1 can be downloaded from the JDBC Driver page.

The pain of no documentation

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Free software is suffering because coders don’t know how to write documentation

Interesting article (read it here). As much important as the “source code documentation” is the documentation for the users. Firebird suffered from the lack of official documentation for a long time. This is being fixed, and you can help right now, contributing to the newest doc crowdfunding from the Project.

Firebird x InterBase

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Historical overview

InterBase was created in 1985: it was the first commercial multi-versioning database. In the end of 1999, Borland decided to close InterBase development and published its source codes under InterBase Public License. This code was copied (it is permitted by the license), and Firebird was born – from the version 1.0 Firebird is a production-ready database, based on previous decades of InterBase development.

At the end of 2000, Borland turned back to the closed source and commercial licenses (exactly as it was earlier) with InterBase and started development of 6.5.

Firebird 1.0 was released in 2002, with many bugfixes and extensions of DDL and DML. The active Firebird development continued after 1.0, and in 2004 the second major version of Firebird (v.1.5) was released. Borland at that time also has introduced new versions (7.0 and 7.1). Firebird 1.5 and InterBase 7.0 was incompatible both by database format (ODS) and core functionality. The migration from InterBase to Firebird and back with backup/restore is impossible since Firebird 2.0 and InterBase 7.0.

Since then, the difference between Firebird and InterBase became bigger.

Check the full article from IBSurgeon, and see the currently diferences between Interbase and Firebird.

Disponível também em Português.

JayBird 3 is released

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We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.0.

Jaybird 3.0 is a big change from Jaybird 2.2 and earlier. The entire low-level implementation has been rewritten to be able to support protocol improvements in newer Firebird versions. We have also made changes with a stricter interpretation of the JDBC requirements, and removed some parts that were either obsolete or not functioning correctly.

Most notable changes in Jaybird 3:

  • Support for wire protocol versions 11, 12, and 13 (without support for encryption and compression); protocol version 13 contributed by Hajime Nakagami
  • Support for the Firebird 3 SRP (Secure Remote Password) authentication mechanism (contributed by Hajime Nakagami)
  • Support for streaming backup and restore (contributed by Ivan Arabadzhiev)
  • Improved Firebird 3 support
  • Improved and stricter JDBC support (including improved java.time support, and more optional methods implemented)
  • Initial JDBC 4.3 (Java 9) support (without real module support)
  • New implementation of the native/embedded Type 2 driver using JNA (a jaybird .dll/.so is no longer needed)
  • Improved character set handling
  • Removal of (buggy) connection pool implementation
  • Removal/replacement of (internal) GDS API

And a large number of smaller bug fixes, improvements, and changes.

We recommend that you do not consider Jaybird 3.0 a drop-in replacement for Jaybird 2.2, and study the release notes carefully. Test your application with Jaybird 3.0 before using it in production.

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9. Basic Java 9 compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

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