Firebird 2.0 flies

It has taken a community of Firechicken fans more than two years, dozens of wet weekends and sleepless nights to get the new relational database working.

Firebird 2.0 has shedloads more functions and coding designed to make it work better and improve security. It has better support for international languages and some new SQL language features.

According to the Firebird website, here, the database is built on more robust code and which will make the creation of Firebird 3.0 easier.

This includes a reworking of indexing to increase performance and cut bottlenecks in searching and matching.

Several limitations inherited from the legacy code have been ditched, such as the 252-byte limit on index size and the 30Gb limit on table size. There is also 64-bit platform support with released binaries available for AMD64 and Intel EM64T on Linux. A 64-bit version is apparently on the way, with Windows 64-bit builds ready for testing. On the security side there is beefed-up password encryption and inbuilt protection for a brute-force attack.

There is also support for SQL200x derived tables, including multi-level nesting and joining of sub queries.

There were no reports of kids queuing for 11 days to snap up copies of the relational database. µ