Firebird Project announces the first Beta release of Firebird 5.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing.
This Beta release arrives with features and improvements already implemented by the Firebird development team, as well as with many bugfixes. Our users are appreciated giving it a try and providing feedback to the development mailing list. Apparent bugs can be reported directly to the bugtracker.
Beta 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 Beta release
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.10 — the latest point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.This sub-release offers a few important bugfixes, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms are immediately available for download, packages for Mac OS will follow shortly.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.9 — the latest point release in the Firebird 3.0 series. This sub-release offers a few important bugfixes, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms are immediately available for download, packages for Mac OS will follow shortly.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 4.0.1 — the first point release in the Firebird 4.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms are immediately available for download.
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.
The Firebird Documentation Team is proud to announce the first release of the English Firebird 3.0 Language Reference (HTML, PDF). You can also find it on the Documentation page. This new Language Reference covers all SQL syntax of Firebird 3.0.
The new English Firebird 3.0 Language Reference is based in part on the Russian Firebird 3.0 Language Reference, but is not a direct translation (though we thankfully copied parts of it). Work has also been started on the Firebird 4.0 Language Reference.
Firebird Project announces the first Release Candidate of Firebird 4.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing on Windows and Linux platforms.
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. Our users are appreciated giving it a try and providing feedback to the development mailing list. Apparent bugs can be reported directly to the bugtracker.
Please read the Release Notes carefully before installing and testing this Release Candidate.
For those who might not be aware, Firebird on MacOS is now relocatable, in that you don't necessarily have to install it as a Framework, this also means that you can create an embedded version out of the current installer.
A new version of the Firebird PHP driver was recently released. This version supports booleans values. Precompiled binaries for PHP 7.3 , 7.4 and 8.0 are available at the download section.
This year Firebird was updated to 3.0.7 in master branch (LibreOffice 7.2), patches related are in external/firebird , interesting to note is build patch for macOS on arm64.
django-firebird pre released 2.2a1 version with support for Firebird 3 and Django 2.2.x LTS (That will be supported until 2022 according to the roadmap)
The stable version corresponds with django 2.2 and live into stable/2.2.x branch. The current master branch of this repository is being developed under django 3.0.x.
fbd is the legacy official driver with support for python 2.x and python 3.x ,
We need to switch to new python3/firebird3.x only driver in the future firebird-driver
So the recommended way today is Django 2.2.x and fdb driver (for Firebird 3.x)
Alternate experimental driver : djfirebirdsql
DJFirebirdSQL is a Django firebird database backend using pure python driver pyfirebirdsql (Work in progress)
The firebird-driver package provides driver for Python 3.8+ and Firebird 3+. This driver uses new Firebird OO API provided by fbclient library. You can download it or install directly from Python Package Index.
To use the driver you can start with the Getting Started from documentation area
A few more examples are in Usage Guide from documentation area
Please note, that his new driver requires Firebird 3+ and Python 3.8+. This “high” base line was chosen deliberately, to use all new features available from latest Firebird & Python releases without constraints and limits that backward compatibility would require. Internally, the driver uses new client API based on interfaces introduced by Firebird 3. This new API has many limits raised (like statement sizes, blob sizes etc.) or completely lifted (like number of databases participating in distributed transaction), and provides access to new Firebird features (like scrollable cursors).
The 1.0 release supports all key driver features you know from FDB (passes all tests for FDB features)
New features in comparison to FDB: – scrollable cursors – type hints everywhere – new FB client API instead old one – enhanced Enums and Flags classes instead isc_* constants – better and more rich support for Firebird services
The driver has also much cleaner structure and namespaces, and less core code than FDB, and although it was not measured yet, it should also perform better. However, the driver API is not 100% backward compatible (with FDB).
Please note, that FDB driver is now considered as legacy driver, and its development will be discontinued together with 2.5 once Firebird 4.0 will be released later this year.
The driver uses firebird-base package, which is a collection of modules that have general applicability, like extended configuration, context-driven logging and trace/audit, hooks, work with structured binary buffers, extended data structures etc. The driver uses almost all features provided by "base" package, but specifically the use of hook mechanism and context-driven logging and trace/audit are potentially the most valuable improvements.
The firebird-lib package provides extensions to the firebird-driver. This package provides modules for: Work with Firebird database schema. Work with Firebird monitoring tables. Processing output from gstat Firebird utility. Processing Firebird server log. Processing output from Firebird server trace & audit sessions.
You can download this library from PyPI or or install it using pip.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.7 — the latest point release in the Firebird 3.0 series. This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Android platforms are immediately available for download.
All users of Firebird v3.0.6 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to v3.0.7 as soon as possible due to several serious bugs found in v3.0.6 and fixed in this point release.
The firebird-driver package provides official Python Database API 2.0-compliant driver. In addition to the minimal feature set of the standard Python DB API, this driver also exposes the new (interface-based) client API introduced in Firebird 3, and number of additional extensions and enhancements for convenient use of Firebird RDBMS. The driver is written as pure-Python package (requires Python 3.8+) on top of Firebird client library (fbclient.so/dll) using ctypes. Driver supports Firebird version 3.0 and higher.
You can download this driver from PyPI or or install it using pip.
Please note, that FDB driver is now considered as legacy driver, and its development will be discontinued together with 2.5 once Firebird 4.0 will be released later this year.
The driver uses firebird-base package, which is a collection of modules that have general applicability, like extended configuration, context-driven logging and trace/audit, hooks, work with structured binary buffers, extended data structures etc. The driver uses almost all features provided by “base” package, but specifically the use of hook mechanism and context-driven logging and trace/audit are potentially the most valuable improvements.
The firebird-lib package provides extensions to the firebird-driver. This package provides modules for: Work with Firebird database schema. Work with Firebird monitoring tables. Processing output from gstat Firebird utility. Processing Firebird server log. Processing output from Firebird server trace & audit sessions.
You can download this library from PyPI or or install it using pip.
The driver is no longer beta, and is now considered as stable for Firebird 3.0 (support for Firebird 4 is still evolving till final release). Documentation is now complete.
ChangeLog:
Documentation, both in code and separate (especially Usage Guide).
Added support for new FB4 data types in ARRAY fields.
New Firebird driver for Python – release 0.7.0. This version provides support for new Firebird 4 data types: TIME/TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE, DECFLOAT and extended DECIMAL/NUMERIC via internal INT128 storage.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.6 — the 6th point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms are immediately available for download, Mac OS packages will follow shortly.
ps: Since May/June 2020, the Firebird documentation project has switched to AsciiDoc for its documentation. This section gives a short overview how AsciiDoc is used by the project.
Firebird Project announces the second (and last) Beta release of Firebird 4.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing on Windows and Linux platforms.
This Beta release arrives with features and improvements already implemented by the Firebird development team, as well as with countless bugfixes. Our users are appreciated giving it a try and providing feedback to the development mailing list. Apparent bugs can be reported directly to the bugtracker.
Beta 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 Beta release.
We are happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 4.
Jaybird 4 is – compared to Jaybird 3 – an incremental release that builds on the foundations of Jaybird 3.
The focus of this release has been on further improving JDBC support and adding support for the new data types and features of Firebird 4.
The main new features are:
Wire encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Database encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Wire compression support
Authentication plugin improvements
Firebird 4 data type bind configuration support (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
Firebird 4 DECFLOAT support
Firebird 4 extended numeric precision support
Firebird 4 time zone support
Firebird 4 statement timeout support (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.5 — the 5th point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows and Linux platforms are immediately available for download, Android and Mac OS packages will follow shortly.
Firebird high-level native client for Node.js / TypeScript updated to v2.1.0 with a few changes .
Feature #30 - Add methods executeReturningAsObject and fetchAsObject to return records as objects instead of arrays. Feature #43 - Add Statement.columnLabels property.
Replication is a long-awaited feature that allows the creating of reliable high-performance database replicas without user-defined triggers and with full DDL support. This talk presents the replication subsystem architecture, possible replication modes, their impact on performance and available tuning options. We'll demonstrate how to set up a simple standby configuration and use it in practice.
This talk done at Firebird Conference 2019 describes the current state of the v4 development and reviews its key features (new data types, Batch API, timezones). Dimitry Yemanov spoke about the future of Firebird development, including the updated release plan and expected post-v4 features. Review of upcoming features for Firebird 5
Understanding High Performance via Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
"Before we can create high-performance code, we must understand what high performance is. The objective (not always attained) in creating high-performance software is to make the software able to carry out its appointed tasks so rapidly that it responds instantaneously, as far as the user is concerned. In other words, high-performance code should ideally run so fast that any further improvement in the code would be pointless.
Notice that the above definition most emphatically does not say anything about making the software as fast as possible. It also does not say anything about using assembly language, or an optimizing compiler, or, for that matter, a compiler at all. It also doesn't say anything about how the code was designed and written. What it does say is that high-performance code shouldn't get in the user's way—and that's all.
That's an important distinction, because all too many programmers think that assembly language, or the right compiler, or a particular high-level language, or a certain design approach is the answer to creating high-performance code. They're not, any more than choosing a certain set of tools is the key to building a house. You do indeed need tools to build a house, but any of many sets of tools will do. You also need a blueprint, an understanding of everything that goes into a house, and the ability to use the tools.
Likewise, high-performance programming requires a clear understanding of the purpose of the software being built, an overall program design, algorithms for implementing particular tasks, an understanding of what the computer can do and of what all relevant software is doing—and solid programming skills, preferably using an optimizing compiler or assembly language. The optimization at the end is just the finishing touch, however."
Firebird Project announces the first Beta release of Firebird 4.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing.
This Beta release arrives with features and improvements already implemented by the Firebird development team, as well as with countless bugfixes. Our users are appreciated giving it a try and providing feedback to the development mailing list. Apparent bugs can be reported directly to the bugtracker.
Beta 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 Beta release.
Firebird 3.0.x introduced 48-bit internal transaction IDs that are publicly (via API and MON$ tables) represented as 64-bit numbers. This makes the new limit roughly equal to 2.8*10^14 transactions, later it could be extended up to the 2^63 limit.
"And my final test as to whether or not Debian succeeded was: could the founder step away from the project and could the project keep going because that is the only point at which you know that the project has basically taken a life of its own." ~ Ian Murdock
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.4 — the 4th point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms are immediately available for download, Mac OS kits will follow shortly.
This presentation was recorded at GOTO Chicago 2018
C++ is an old language only used by the unfortunate few that absolutely have to, right? Wrong!
C++ is not the language it used to be: clunky, error-prone and lacking in tooling. A lot has changed in the last decade: three new language revisions, new compilers and all-new: [...]
Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://gotochgo.com/2018/sessions/359
Here are a few related performance/tunning articles
In the first article Vlad does quite a few benchmarks between Firebird 2.5/3.0.0/3.0.2 releases . It's very nice that minor releases brings free speedups. He also shows Firebird 3.0.3 performance related changes and fixes and the future ones that are already in Firebird 4
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.3 — the third point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes (including fix for a recently reported security vulnerability) and also adds a few minor features and improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows and Linux on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms are immediately available for download.
Collabora will develop a mechanism to import database files with high fidelity from the HSQLDB binary file format, which has been used inside many existing ODB files, by reading the Java serialization code, and writing a filter to import all data into LibreOffice Base. The objective is to remove the legacy Java/HSQLDB database and move to Firebird.
There were quite a few bugs fixed in the last two months related to Firebird driver in LibreOffice also interesting commits
Tamas Bunth commited : Add HSQLDB schema import. He also fixed Bug 104734 - FIREBIRD: Add those field types that are not available with FB while they are available with Hsqldb. Lionel Elie Mamane fixed Bug 104986 - Firebird: Function EXTRACT doesn't work with WEEKDAY, YEARDAY, MILLISECOND.
Tor Lillqvist fixed Bug 71007 - EDITING: Embedded Firebird - Impossible to set milliseconds in a timefield with GUI
Tamas Bunth fixed Bug 70425 - EDITING: Embedded Firebird - Copying integer values from Calc to Base impossible
One side effect of new Firebird 3.0.3 builds for Apple Macosx is that now there is a Mach-O dynamically linked shared library for arm_v7 that can be used on IOS.
You can ask for details on Firebird-devel
ps: For Firebird 2.5.x there is a build on Paul's blog
also Egor Pugin created Cmake files for IOS Builds (I didn't tested that route yet)
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.
New version 5.11.0.0 of ADO.NET provider for Firebird is ready for download. This release is about .NET Standard 2.0. Now the .NET Standard 2.0, with all the new APIs supported, version is available.
Another new feature is support for passing key over the wire for encrypted databases (you need to have server side plugin for this feature, i.e. this from IBPhoenix). New connection string property crypt key is available for that. The value is base64 encoded data representing the key.
You can load any .NET code in FbNetExternalEngine also as Proof Of Concept you can also
load Firebird Embedded inside that in server (Firebird inside Firebird in DotNet External Engine).
A beta version of a 64bit Firebird 3.0.3 for MacOSX is now available as a download
for those of you who might be interested in trying it.
http://www.ibphoenix.com/download/firebird/30
The Firebird Project's 2017 project is to translate into English the Firebird Developer Guide, a Russian-language work sponsored by IBSurgeon and Moscow Exchange, edit and review it and publish it in the project's documentation library. For this project, as ever, we need funding. This is your opportunity to make it happen, by contributing whatever you can to our crowdfunding campaign.
In order to remove the legacy Java / HSQLDB database completely, and move fully to Firebird in LibreOffice 5.4 it is necessary to be able to import old document data with high fidelity from the HSQLDB binary file format which we have used (for performance) inside so many of our existing ODB files. This task involves reading the existing (reasonably simple) Java serialization code, and writing an (import only) filter to import this data safely into base.
ps: Here is official Travis CI announcement: Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 is available
