Download Firebird 2.5.2

Well-known databases for storing large amounts of data are of course Oracle’s 11g database, IBM’s DB2 database and Microsoft’s 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 2.5.2 with the following abbreviated announcement and a list of changes:

Firebird 2.5.2 Sub Release

An important change was made to the implementation of the GEN_UUID() function to make it comply properly with the requirements of RFC-4122. For more information, refer to this topic.

A bug was corrected that caused faulty byte or character order in the results of the functions CHAR_TO_UUID and UUID_TO_CHAR on big endian platforms. This correction will impact code that called those functions on big-Endian hosts in Firebird 2.5 or 2.5.1.

Warning: all users upgrading from Firebird 2.5.1 to a higher sub-release are strongly advised to migrate databases using gbak backup/restore. If this is impracticable, at least rebuild all compound indices in the databases being migrated. Databases being upgraded from older Firebird versions (ODS 11.1 and lower) or v.2.5.0 are not affected by this regression.

As well as many more bug fixesaccumulated over the months since v.2.5.1, this sub-release provides a few minor improvements, particularly of help to administrators. Summary:

• Some welcome improvements were made to the Trace services, viz.,
  • Sessions can now be configured to log user and automatic sweep activity. Documentation for this option can be found on the Tracker ticket CORE-3656.
  • TRACE now produces statistics of actions that happen after a transaction has finished. See Tracker ticket CORE-3598.
  • TRACE now provides the ability to log errors that occur in runtime (lock conflicts, key violations, et al.). See Tracker ticket CORE-3539.
• It is now possible to use the API to do a remote backup/restore. see Back Up to or Restore from a Remote Backup File.
• A note is now written into firebird.log when an automatic sweep is started.
• Support was added for C preprocessor flags in the Firebird build system.