Firebird News

Bill Oliver from sas.com wrote on firebird-devel about the status of Vulcan project:

My company was original requestor/sponsor of Vulcan project. You are much
better off at this point in time looking into Firebird 2.5. Even at Beta
status, you will find Firebird 2.5 much more stable than Vulcan that is
present on Source Forge.

All of the key features from Vulcan have been front-ported to Firebird 2.5
beta. These include:

* SMP support in Embedded mode, with per-database lock files. This is now
called Embedded Super Classic
* Ports to 64-bit Unix and Windows. Specifically, ports for Solaris (S64),
Solarix AMD (SAX), HP-UX on PA RISC and Itanium, and 64-bit Linux support
* SQL-2003 compliant SQL State implementation
* Statement cancelling
* Ability to “unprepare” a SQL Statement, vs. simply “closing” it.
* Ability to create users through SQL, instead of through a client tool
* Support for hexadecimal literal constants
* The whole codebase is now thread-safe. Statement handles should be
thread-safe
* Numerous bug fixes

The build system works quite nicely on the Unix side, using the gnu
toolchain + autoconf. On Windows, the build system is very straight-forward.
There is added advantage that on windows there is daily snapshot build for
32-bit and 64-bit windows that you can use for testing.

I can’t say Vulcan is any easier for a newbie. It’s the same code base, just
reworked. There are many bug fixes to build system in Firebird 2.5,
especially in area of a “portable”, cross-unix build system.

We continue our own thread testing against Firebird 2.5 and all issues we’ve
reported have been fixed in upcoming Beta 2.

Alex just last week pushed last fixes, that now let Firebird 2.5 run on AIX,
HP-UNIX Itanium, HP-UNIX PA-RISC, Solaris Sparc, Solaris Intel and pass
basic regression. Very impressive.