Firebird News

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.

PHP PDO Firebird: Boolean data type support

Dorin Marcoci created a pull request for PDO Firebird driver and he is looking for testers for Boolean data type support (Firebird 3.0)

#PHP #PDO #Firebird: Boolean data type support: https://t.co/wEWMVcHLVV Testers are welcome!

— Dorin Marcoci (@marcodorin) May 13, 2017

Release of IBProvider v3.41 and other services

Hello everyone!

We released three things:

New update of IBProvider – v3.41.
New services for IBProvider – “LCPI OLE DB Services”
New update of our ADO.NET provider – v1.0.7

Full news text: http://www.ibprovider.com/eng/news/n_170511.html

Firebird 3.0.2 Package is uploaded into Firebird 3.0 ppa.

Firebird 3.0.2 Package is uploaded into Firebird 3.0 ppa for current ubuntu releases .

There are packages for Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty ), 16.10 (Yakkety) , 16.04 LTS (Xenial) and 14.04 LTS (Trusty).

Firebird 3.0.2 changes are available in the release notes

Building Firebird 3 on MacOS

Firebird 3 was released almost a year ago and it has already got two minor releases. But there is still no official packages for MacOS. So this post is about my humble attempt to build it on MacOs from source code. Most of the instructions are taken from Paul Beach’s Firebird Devel list post or from his blog.

Read full article here.

JayBird 3 is released

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.