The Firebird Project has achieved a point release of its small, embeddable, open source, relational database which is based on a fork of Borland Interbase. Firebird V1.5.1 features support for the NPTL (native POSIX thread library), better handling of the NONE charset (character set), and more debugging options.

Hacker Marius Popa says the release, while incremental, demonstrates the Project's commitment to keep improving the C++ or “2.0 series” fork of the Firebird Project, which achieved its initial release, V1.5.0, in February.

According to Popa, the 1.5.0 release had a “link-time backward compatibility issue with the NPTL that [could] cause it to be unstable on Linux distributions that enable the NPTL in the GNU C.” The new 1.5.1 release should solve this problem, Popa says.

Additional improvements include a charset improvement that allows the use of NONE as a fully transparent charset everythere. “Changes were made in the engine to make the character set NONE more friendly about reading / writing data from and to fields of another character set,” Popa said.

The new release also adds the capability to configure the database to abort a server process for bug checking or structured exceptions, in order to produce a core dump.

Firebird offers more functionality than many small, embeddable databases, including triggers and stored procedures. For more information about Firebird and the 2.0-series codebase, refer to the February release announcement.

Firebird V1.5.1 is available now for download under the Interbase Public License, a derivative of the Mozilla Public License.

Bird, not fox

The development version of the Mozilla browser changed its name from Firebird to Firefox in early February, to avoid confusion with the older Firebird open source database project.

 
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