Software update: Firebird 2.5.6

Well-known databases for storing large amounts of data are of course Oracle’s 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. Version 2.5.6 of Firebird has been released with the following changes:

Firebird 2.5.6 Sub Release

This sub-release comes with a few bug fixes and a couple of improvements:

• Run-time errors raised inside EXECUTE BLOCK now provide the location context (line and column numbers). Backport from Firebird 3 by D. Yemanov. For more info, see Tracker ticket CORE-5216.
• Previously, when a restore failed to activate and recreate a deferred index, typically because of insufficient temporary disk space, gbak would return a non-zero completion code (“FAIL”) only when the failure affected a referential constraint. Now, gbak returns a fail code for any index that fails the activate-and-rebuild step. This improvement should be particularly helpful where backups and restores are managed using scripts, enabling indexes left inactive after the restore to be caught and corrected.

Firebird 2.5.5 Sub Release

This sub-release comes with a moderate collection of bugs fixed over the past six months or so.

Vlad Khorsun’s improvement for gbak in Firebird 3.0, producing run-time statistics in the verbose output, was backported to this v.2.5.5 sub-release. For more information, see Run-time Statistics in Verbose Output and SPB Support for New Statistics Feature in gbak Output.

One of Firebird’s oldest bugs—CORE-214—was finally fixed: COUNT(DISTINCT …) was too slow (until now!)