The survey about Firebird 3 installer is closed, and results are now published (see below).
Thanks to everyone who participated and contributed with comments and ideas. I hope the result will help guiding the Project about what people expect/wants from the official installer 😉
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.5 — the latest minor release in the Firebird 2.5 series.
This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms are immediately available for download.
The Firebird Docs team is calling for people who are fluent in both English and Firebird’s SQL to assist with reviewing the English text of the Firebird 2.5 Language Reference manual. Of 10 chapters and 8 Appendices, 4.5 chapters are still untouched by reviewers. It would be good to have the reviewing done to coordinate with the forthcoming 2.5.5 release but correctness takes priority.
Still to do are: half of the DDL chapter, DML, PSQL, Functions and Variables, Transactions.
If you feel able to help with the review, please subscribe to the [firebird-docs] list here and make yourself and your preferred topics known.
The Firebird Project needs your opinion regarding some points in the Windows installer of the upcoming Firebird 3.0 final release. Please answer the survey available at https://eSurv.org?u=fb3installer based on your preferences.
Your answer can help to guide us in future enhancements. Survey will be online until 20-Nov-2015.
Firebird Project announces the first Release Candidate of Firebird 3.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing.
This Release Candidate demonstrates the complete set of features and improvements developed for the new release. Release Candidates are generally considered stable enough and may be recommended for testing in “almost-production” environments. Please report about any found bugs to the bugtracker.
Please read the Release Notes carefully before installing and testing this Release Candidate.
Download page:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-3-0-0-rc1/
Release Notes:
http://web.firebirdsql.org/download/prerelease/rlsnotes/Firebird-3.0.0_RC1-ReleaseNotes.pdf
—
Dmitry Yemanov
Firebird 3 Release Candidate 1 is now tagged at Sourceforge. Next steps are: run the QA tests, prepare docs, and release it for testing.
Version 0.64 of SQL Relay, the powerful connection pool, load balancer, query router, and database proxy, is now available.
This release features support for Informix databases, support for remote and centralized configuration files, a better configure script for building from source on Windows, improvements to the drop-in replacement library for PostgreSQL, and a “softttl” parameter for dynamically spawned database connections. The tool is Open Source, and also supports Firebird database.
At the 12th Firebird Developers Day, I talked about Using Firebird in high latency networks (aka. internet). Below are two slides from my presentation, where you can see the improvements in Firebird 3 wire protocol, compared to FB 2.5 and to MySQL.
Enjoy!
Obs: Left axis values are expressed in seconds. Test server was hosted in Amazon (USA) and client accessing it was located in Brazil. Ping reported latency of 219ms. The smaller the bar, the better.
Above graph shows the result of fetching 10.000 records from a real table used to store customers data. Red bars represents records with all the fields filled (ie: there was no fields containing nulls) and blue bars represents fetching records where some of the fields were nulls. Tests where done with and without compression.
The same table used in previous graph was created in MySQL InnoDB (same data). Blue bars means that wire compression was disabled, and red has compression enabled. Left side graphs has all fields filled (ie. there wasn’t null fields) and in right side graphs, some records has some null fields.
As you see, FB 3 won 😉
I should mention that there was no blob fields in the table, and this makes a lot of difference. Fetching non-null blobs makes the fetch slower in Firebird (more roundtrips are needed).
PS: The improvements in the FB 3 wire protocol were sponsored by donations collected in the 9th edition of FDD conference, and were implemented by Dmitry Yemanov. Compression was implemented by Alex Peshkov.
For those who like to read database comparisions/benchmarks, here is one that probably all Firebird fans will like 🙂
During the registration process for the 12th edition of the Firebird Developers Day, people could donate money to the Firebird Foundation. In total, it was collected R$ 4.590,27 (~ USD 1.3k). The list of donors is available here.
Thanks to all who contributed! And remember that anyone can contribute, donating or becoming a member of the Firebird Foundation.
