Download Firebird 2.5.3

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 2.5.3 with the following abbreviated announcement and a list of changes:

Firebird 2.5.3 Sub Release

This sub-release of Firebird 2.5 adds no new features but includes a large collection of bug fixes that have accumulated since V.2.5.2. A few minor improvements appear in this sub-release, viz.

• New context variables have been added to the SYSTEM namespace to retrieve more information about the current connection and current transaction.
• The added variables: SYSTEM::CLIENT_PID and SYSTEM::CLIENT_PROCESS for the current connection, SYSTEM::LOCK_TIMEOUT and SYSTEM::READ_ONLY for the current transaction.
• Some limits have increased:
  • The maximum number of connections on Windows for Superserver and Superclassic has been raised from 1024 to 2048 connections.
  • The maximum number of input parameters for external functions (UDFs) has increased to 15.
• Error reporting improvements, including:
  • More details are now reported for “object in use” errors.
  • The relation name is now added to the text of validation constraint error messages, to help identify the error context.
  • Error reporting for index and constraint violations has been extended to include the problematic key value.
• Physical backup (using ALTER DATABASE BEGIN/END BACKUP or the nBackup utility) was improved to speed up extension of the main database file when backup state changes from stalled to merge.
  • Contention for the allocation table lock while a database is in the stalled physical backup state has been reduced.
  • Faster file growth has been enabled on Linux systems that support fallocate().
  • Attachments no longer block others when the allocation table is being read for the first time.
• Execution of a SET STATISTICS INDEX statement no longer blocks or slows down concurrent attachments.
• The scan for limbo transactions at the end of a sweep has been improved.
• Support for the UPDATE OR INSERT statement and the RETURNING clause have been implemented for Embedded SQL (ESQL).