Firebird 3.0.6 is out

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.6 — the 6th point release in the Firebird 3.0 series. 

This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes.
Binary kits for Windows, Linux and Android platforms are immediately available for download, Mac OS packages will follow shortly.

New Firebird driver for Python – preview release

There is now an official preview release – v0.5.0 – available on PyPI:
https://pypi.org/project/firebird-driver/

All core driver functionality works, except handling of limbo
transactions due to error discovered in Firebird (should be fixed in
soon to be released Firebird 3.0.6).

This preview version was released because the driver architecture is
evolving rapidly, and I would like get some feedback before the initial
release planned for end of June.

Some important notes about the driver architecture:

  1. It uses namespace package “firebird”, and the driver is distributed
    as “firebird.driver” package. There are other packages that share the
    same namespace: “firebird.base” and “firebird.butler”. In future I’d
    like introduce “firebird.lib” package for extension libraries (former
    schema, monitor and other extension modules in FDB).
  2. Although the initial driver design was close to FDB, there are
    significant differences and the driver architecture and API will diverge
    further from FDB or KInterbasDB. The sole backward “compatibility” is
    defined as compliance to Python DB API 2.0. So the new driver is not and
    will not be a drop-in replacement for FDB.

Here are some main decisions related to implementation and architecture: