Announcing cl-firebird v1.0.0: Pure Common Lisp Driver with Full node-firebird Parity & Multi-Version CI Matrix

We are excited to announce the release of cl-firebird v1.0.0 — a pure Common Lisp database driver for Firebird 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0+. Featuring full 1:1 feature parity with node-firebird, this release brings 12-factor connection URIs, thread-safe connection pooling, named placeholder parameter binding, custom type parsers (type-cast), streaming cursors, database events (POST_EVENT), Service Manager support, Firebird 6.0 tablespaces/schemas, and an automated GitHub Actions testing matrix.

Key Highlights

• Pure Common Lisp wire protocol (zero C / FFI dependencies): communicates directly over TCP sockets using Firebird’s remote protocol (negotiating up to Protocol 20); runs on SBCL, CCL, and other ANSI CL implementations without libfbclient.
• 12-factor connection URIs & attach-or-create: firebird://user:pass@host:port/database?pageSize=8192 (IPv6 supported), traditional DSN syntax, and automatic database creation when missing.
• Named placeholders & SQL injection protection: bind :name parameters from property lists, association lists, or hash-tables; escape / escape-string helpers cover strings, numbers, booleans, dates, octet vectors, and NULLs.
• Built-in thread-safe connection pooling: auto-reaping of idle connections, safe queueing under heavy concurrency, and live metrics (pool-total-count, pool-idle-count, pool-active-count, pool-waiting-count).
• Custom type parsers (type-cast) & statement caching: per-column custom decoders and transparent reuse of prepared server-side statements.
• High-performance streaming & batches: sequentially streams large result sets row-by-row; execute-batch handles bulk inserts/updates.
• Firebird 6.0 features & Protocol 20: tablespaces (create-tablespace, alter-tablespace, drop-tablespace), schemas, session search paths, and default schemas.
• Database events & Service Manager: attach-event / detach-event for POST_EVENT signals, plus an administration API for backup/restore, user management, trace sessions, and diagnostics.
• Comprehensive testing: a 66-check FiveAM test suite and a GitHub Actions CI matrix across Firebird 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0-snapshot.

Links & Installation

• GitHub repository: mariuz/cl-firebird
• Release tag: v1.0.0
• Quicklisp: (ql:quickload :cl-firebird)
• Full announcement with code examples: Announcing cl-firebird v1.0.0