Firebird is a relational database which will offer you many ANSI SQL ordinary features that runs on Windows, Linux and a variety of Unix systems.
Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. Firebird has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981.
FREE LIKE A BIRD. Anyone can build a custom version of Firebird, as long as the modifications are made available, under the same IDPL licensing, for others to use and build on.
First you need to choose a Firebird server architecture. There are two models: the classic and the super server architecture. The super server is the main architecture for Microsoft win32 platforms (classic architecture is available on Win32 only from v1.5 onward). Unix style environments often have a choice of both the classic or super architecture.
If you are unsure start with the classic architecture which is a little easier to experiment with and to learn the basics. Then once you know more you will be able to determine which architecture is best for your installation. From a functional point of view both are equivalent and they are interchangable.
Classic
The classic architecture allows for programs to directly open the database file. It is architected to allow the same database to be opened by several programs at once. The classic engine also allows remote connections to local databases by providing an inetd or xinetd service (This spawns a seperate task per user connection).
Super Server
The super server architecture provides a server process, and client process cannot directly open the database file and all SQL requests are done via the server using a socket. The super server makes use of lightweight theads to process the requests.
Here are some key features of "Firebird":
· On-Disk Structure
· Database Triggers
· SQL and Objects
· Procedural SQL
· Security
· International Language Support
· Platform Support
· Administrative
· Remote Interface
· Derived Tables
· PSQL Now Supports Named Cursors
· Reimplemented Protocols on Windows
· Reworking of Garbage Collection
· Porting of the Services API to Classic is Complete
· Lock Timeout for WAIT Transactions
· New Implementation of String Search Operators
· Reworking of Updatable Views
· Additional Database Shutdown Modes Introduced
· UDFs Improved re NULL Handling
· Run-time Checking for Concatenation Overflow
· Changes to Synchronisation Logic
· Support for 64-bit Platforms
· Record Enumeration Limits Increased
· Debugging Improvements
· Improved Connection Handling on POSIX Superserver
· PSQL Invariant Tracking Reworked
· ROLLBACK RETAIN Syntax Support
· No More Registry Search on Win32 Servers
· More Optimizer Improvements
Requirements:
· MS Visual C runtime libraries
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· 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.
· 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 fixes accumulated over the months since v.2.5.1, this sub-release provides a few minor improvements, particularly of help to administrators. In 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 acti...
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