Firebird 4 is released

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 4.0 — the latest major release of the Firebird relational database.

Firebird 4.0 introduces new data types and many improvements without radical changes in architecture or operation, the most important are:

  • Built-in logical replication;
  • Extended length of metadata identifiers (up to 63 characters);
  • New INT128 and DECFLOAT data types, longer precision for NUMERIC/DECIMAL data types;
  • Support for international time zones;
  • Configurable time-outs for connections and statements;
  • Pooling of external connections;
  • Batch operations in the API;
  • Built-in cryptographic functions;
  • New ODS (version 13) with new system and monitoring tables;
  • Maximum page size increased to 32KB.

Please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. The complete Language Reference is also available.

Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms (both 32-bit and 64-bit) are immediately available for download.

Firebird 4 Migration Guide

Denis Simonov, editor and contributor of Firebird Language Reference, and also the author of Firebird Developer Guide, has written the “Short Firebird Migration Guide To Firebird 4.0” (also available as PDF):

  1. Manual installation of Firebird 40 on Windows                                             
  2. Converting the database to a new format                                                   
  3. Migrating database aliases                                                                
  4. Migrating user list                                                                       
  5. Configuring Trusted Authentication                                                        
  6. Application-level incompatibilities                                                         

Well, it is not that short: 23 pages of essential information about Firebird 4 migration.
It covers migration from 3.0 and from 2.5, since many people still use 2.5, but plan to jump to 4.0 due to native replication and improved performance.
We are expecting Firebird 4 release very, very soon, so, if you are eager to be the first to try it, download the most recent snapshot, read this Migration Guide, and do the test migration!

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