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04/11/2007

Firebird V2.01 is available for download.

Firebird 2.0 brings a large collection of long-awaited enhancements that significantly improve performance, security and support for international languages and realise some desirable new SQL language features. Under the surface, it also provides a much more robust code platform from which the re-architecting planned for Firebird 3.0 is proceeding.

This release contains a large number of new features, including derived tables, support for Execute Block, increased table sizes, new improved index code (the 252-byte index length limit is no longer applicable), expression indices, numerous optimiser improvements, enhanced security features, support for on-line incremental backups along with numerous other improvements and bug fixes.

Features of the release include

• A thorough reworking of indexing to ramp up performance and minimise bottlenecks in searching and matching
• Several limitations inherited from the legacy code have now gone, such as the 252-byte limit on index size and the 30 Gb limit on table size.
• A new interface for plugging in international character sets, including enhanced Unicode support, along with a number of new and corrected collations
• 64-bit platform support with released binaries available for AMD64 and Intel EM64T on Linux. Windows 64-bit builds are ready for testing and will follow in a sub-release
• An intense makeover of server security, including beefed-up password encryption and inbuilt protection for brute-force attack
• Support for SQL200x derived tables, including multi-level nesting and joining of subqueries
• EXECUTE BLOCK syntax to enable blocks of procedural SQL (PSQL) to be executed in dynamic SQL statements
• Explicit cursors in PSQL, also available inside EXECUTE BLOCK statements
• Optional WAIT lock conflict timeout, available as both a SET TRANSACTION argument and as a transaction parameter in the API
• All-new incremental backup capability
• Complete re-architecting of "serverless" local connection protocol on Windows to eliminate the inherent instability of the legacy IPServer protocol
• Fully completed implementation of the Services API on all platforms

Downloads Firebird V2.0.1

• 21st Mar 2007 Official Windows Setup and Installer For Classic and SuperServer (.exe) (4.1mb)
• 21st Mar 2007 SuperServer and Classic for Windows (.zip) (5.6mb)
• 21st Mar 2007 Embedded Server for Windows (.zip) (3.1mb)
• 21st Mar 2007 Windows Debug Build - Installer (.exe) (7.0mb)
• 21st Mar 2007 Windows Debug Build (.zip) (10.4mb)
• 21st Mar 2007 Embedded Server Debug Build for Windows (.zip) (5.3mb)