Download Firebird 2.5.1

Well-known databases for storing large amounts of data are of course Oracle with its 11g database, IBM with the DB2 database and Microsoft with SQL Server. Another database management system is Firebird, which originates from Inprise’s Interbase database. Inprise is known today as Borland Software, whose history dates back to this page can be read. This relational database can be installed on a variety of operating systems, including Linux and Windows platforms, making it widely deployable. The developers have released version 2.5.1 with the following abbreviated announcement and a list of changes from version 2.5.0.

Firebird 2.5.1 (sub-release) is available

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.1 – a minor release of the award-winning relational database management system. This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and many important improvements – for example, performance improvements during a database restore, the ability to write to global temporary tables in read-only databases, etc.

For the full list of changes please refer to the Release Notes, Chapter 2 “New in Firebird 2.5”. Firebird 2.5.1 has 100% compatible on-disk structure with Firebird 2.5.0, so it is recommended to migrate to 2.5.1 as soon as possible. To download Firebird 2.5.1, please visit the download section at the official web-site: www.firebirdsql.org.

The months that have passed since the initial release have seen numerous Tracker issues tackled to address things that have been reported broken, bent or compromised in v.2.5. As well as a long list of bug fixes, a few minor improvements have been made. Summary:

• The SQLSTATE code has been made available as a PSQL context variable, for use in WHEN .. exception blocks, in the same manner as GDSCODE and SQLCODE
• Now it is possible to write to global temporary tables in a read-only database
• Diagnostics for internal trace errors were improved
• The fbtracemgr utility will now do a periodic flush to output
• Performance of gbak restore at the data insertion stages has improved
• Conversions between BLOBs and other data types can now be effected in the API functions
• The Services API now supports the “metadata-only” restore
• A “silent install” switch has been implemented for make install on POSIX
• The unused bytes of VARCHAR values ​​in the message buffer are now set to zero
• The actual record compression ratio is now estimated in the optimizer
• The MON$STATEMENT_ID value now stays constant among monitoring snapshots
• The SO_KEEPALIVE option on the client TCP socket will now be set, as a measure to guard against aggressive timing out of sockets by newer Windows systems
• Lock Manager can now cancel waits that become interminable
• A platform port of v.2.5.1 for HPPA has been done for both Linux and Alpha