A project maintaining a lightweight, embeddable database is shipping the first release candidate for its second major version. Firebird 2.0rc1 features derived tables, support for “execute block,” increased table sizes, better index code, and numerous other improvements.

Firebird is an open source, embeddable (within other applications) SQL database that grew out of Borland Interbase. The project includes a database engine, ODBC driver, “Jaybird” native class 4 JCA-JDBC driver, .NET data provider, and extensive documentation and testing materials. A related “FlameRobin” project aims to provide a graphical interface assembled from open source components.

Firebird 2.0 is available in a “Classic” version, which spawns a new process for each connection, as well as a “SuperServer” version that uses a threaded architecture with a shared cache, for better performance with lots of simultaneous connections.

Firebird 2.0 is the first stable release of the “C++” fork of the Firebird project. The C++ fork achieved its initial 1.50 release in February of 2004.

Marius Popa of the FlameRobin project says, “There will definitely be RC2 as well, as we have to complete the documentation and solve some minor installation issues. Also, there were a few regressions fixed in the meantime. But should one expect RC3 and so on? This depends on you only. The better you test the server and provide us with the feedback, the sooner we release the final version.”

More details about the release can be found on the Firebird project website, here.

 
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