Category: General news

Firebird related news

Database .NET v24 released

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Database .NET v24 is an innovative, powerful and intuitive multiple database management tool.
(Full support for Firebird 1.5~4.0+)

http://fishcodelib.com/Database.htm

Fix for Meltdown and Spectre will affect your server performance!

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Microsoft, Apple and several Linux distros started to distribute patches to try to fix the recent security flaws found in Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs, in almost every CPU released in the last 20 years. The security flaws are known as Meltdown (affects Intel) and Spectre (affects Intel, AMD and some ARM processors).

The flaw allow softwares to access protected memory areas that should be accessed only by the Operating System kernel, and get sensitive data, like passwords, etc.

There are two problems with the fixes:

  1. They do not fix 100% of the problem, since it is related on how the CPUs were designed. So far, there is no 100% solution for the problem, and probably it will never exists.
  2. They impact badly in performance.

In a recent post to firebird-devel list, an user reported that the performance of the Firebird server dropped ~30% after he upgraded its Linux kernel to a version that “fix” those security flaws.

General reports over the internet shows that the most affected areas of the system are CPU, RAM and Disk, so any software that makes intensive use of some of those areas will probably have its performance significantly degraded.

Just to be clear: this performance loss doesn’t affect only Firebird, but any software!

Firebird 2.5.8 sub-release is available

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Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.8 — the latest minor release in the Firebird 2.5 series.

This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows and Linux on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms are immediately available for download. Binary kits for Mac OS X will follow shortly.

Jaybird 3.0.3 and 2.2.14 released

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The Firebird JDBC team is happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.3 and Jaybird 2.2.14.

Jaybird 3.0.3 contains the following fixes and changes:

  • Fixed: Some older versions of JBoss would throw an java.lang.IllegalStateException: Can't overwrite cause when FBResourceException initialised its exception cause. (JDBC-512)
  • Improved: Added explicit Automatic-Module-Name: org.firebirdsql.jaybird to manifest for forwards compatibility with Java 9 modularization. (JDBC-511)

See the Jaybird 3.0.3 release notes for more information. Jaybird 3.0.3 can be downloaded from the JDBC Driver page.

Jaybird 2.2.14 contains the following fixes and changes:

  • Fixed: FBTraceManager.loadConfigurationFromFile strips line breaks (JDBC-493)
  • Improved: Added explicit Automatic-Module-Name: org.firebirdsql.jaybird to manifest for forwards compatibility with Java 9 modularization. (JDBC-511)

See the Jaybird 2.2.14 release notes for more information. Jaybird 2.2.14 can be downloaded from the JDBC Driver page.

Firebird Perl extension DBD-Firebird version 1.31 is released

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Perl extension DBD::Firebird version 1.31 is released with quite a few changes if you compare with provious announcement , here are a few from the ChangeLog:

* remove artificial hard-coded limit of 1_000_000 bytes when fetching BLOB data
* add /usr/local to the list of possible firebird homes [RT#123723]
* blob_type needs to be signed to be assigned/compared to -1
* bpb parameter to isc_open_blob2 is a pointer
* drop unused column character set definition
* correctly check for Test::CheckDeps presense
* finish: do not check uninitialised status vector If statement type is isc_info_sql_stmt_exec_procedure,isc_dsql_free_statement is not called and there is no point checking the status vector for errors. An error there may be from a previous call, or just plain garbage.
Fixes Debian bug : 883183 — test failure on i386, and RT#110979
* add support for a ‘timeout=$secs’ parameter [RT#119764]
* put fb_api_ver in XS and make it available to both embedded and regular driver
* more constants for client version (major/minor/full version string)

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