FirebirdSQL 2.0 e' disponibile
Finalmente, dopo vari mesi di testing, con ben 5 release candidate, FirebirdSQL e' giunto alla release 2.0 finale. Le innovazioni di questo dbms tanto potente quanto poco diffuso, sono piovute praticamente ovunque, dall'ambito prestazionale sino alle architetture supportate, dalla sicurezza ai nuovi standard supportati, etc...
Firebird e' un dbms davvero potente, meno conosciuto del piu' diffuso MySQL a causa di una certa difficolta' di utilizzo (per le funzioni piu' avanzate) unita ad una cronica mancanza di maturi e semplici tools di amministrazione gratuiti.
Tra le nuove caratteristiche ne spicca una davvero molto sentita e a gran voce richiesta: il supporto nativo alle piattaforme x86-64.
Il resto delle novita' sono (in sintesi):
* A thorough reworking of indexing to ramp up performance and minimise bottlenecks in searching and matching
* Several limitations inherited from the legacy code have now gone, such as the 252-byte limit on index size and the 30 Gb limit on table size.
* A new interface for plugging in international character sets, including enhanced Unicode support, along with a number of new and corrected collations
* 64-bit platform support with released binaries available for AMD64 and Intel EM64T on Linux. Windows 64-bit builds are ready for testing and will follow in a sub-release
* An intense makeover of server security, including beefed-up password encryption and inbuilt protection for brute-force attack
* Support for SQL200x derived tables, including multi-level nesting and joining of subqueries
* EXECUTE BLOCK syntax to enable blocks of procedural SQL (PSQL) to be executed in dynamic SQL statements
* Explicit cursors in PSQL, also available inside EXECUTE BLOCK statements
* Optional WAIT lock conflict timeout, available as both a SET TRANSACTION argument and as a transaction parameter in the API
* All-new incremental backup capability
* Complete re-architecting of "serverless" local connection protocol on Windows to eliminate the inherent instability of the legacy IPServer protocol
* Fully completed implementation of the Services API on all platforms
