Firebird 2.5.9 Sub-release
This sub-release comes with a significant list of bug fixes.
V. 2.5.9 Improvements
(CORE-5853) Two new context variables LOCALTIME and LOCALTIMESTAMP that are synonyms
for CURRENT_TIME and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, respectively. They can be used in this sub-release and in
Firebird 3.0.4 and later, for forward-compatibility with Firebird 4. See Context Variables LOCALTIME and
LOCALTIMESTAMP for details.
Implemented by A. dos Santos Fernandes
~ ~ ~
(CORE-5434) A read-only transaction will no longer force write the Header\TIP page content to disk
immediately after a change. This improvement gives a significant performance gain where there are numerous
light read-only transactions. At this stage, it affects only Superserver. For Classic and Superclassic it is more
complex to implement and should appear in Firebird 4.0.
Implemented by V. Khorsun
~ ~ ~
(CORE-2493) The IP address of the remote host is now appended to error messages in firebird.log for
TCP connections.
Implemented by V. Khorsun
~ ~ ~
Firebird 2.5.8 Sub-release
This sub-release comes with a significant list of bug fixes.
V. 2.5.8 Improvements
(CORE-5674) Common Table Expressions are now allowed to be left unused.
General Notes
2
implemented by V. Khorsun
~ ~ ~
(CORE-5640) Multiple simultaneous new connections to a database in Superclassic no longer cause a
response bottleneck for one another.
implemented by A. Peshkov
~ ~ ~
(CORE-5629) Output from gstat now includes the date and time of analysis.
implemented by A. Peshkov
~ ~ ~
(CORE-5543) Restoring a pre ODS 11.1 database now correctly populates RDB$RELATION_TYPE
field in the metadata.
implemented by D. Yemanov
~ ~ ~
Firebird 2.5.7 Sub-release
This sub-release comes with a handful of bug fixes, including addressing a serious security vulnerability
present in all preceding Firebird 2.5 releases.
Warning
The exploit is available to authenticated users only, somewhat limiting the risks. However, it is strongly recommended
that any previous V.2.5.x installation be upgraded to this one without delay.
Improvements
(CORE-5475) It is now possible to filter out info and warnings from the trace log.
implemented by V. Khorsun
~ ~ ~
(CORE-4563) Support was added for fast/low-latency “TCP Loopback Fast Path” functionality introduced
in Windows 8 and Server 2012.
This feature is said to improve the performance of the TCP stack for local loopback connections, by shortcircuiting
the TCP stack for local calls. The details of the feature can be found in this Microsoft Technet blog.
Implemented by V. Khorsun
~ ~ ~
General Notes
3
Firebird 2.5.6 Sub-release
This sub-release comes with a few bug fixes and a couple of improvements:
• Run-time errors raised inside EXECUTE BLOCK now provide the location context (line and column numbers).
Backport from Firebird 3 by D. Yemanov. For more info, see Tracker ticket CORE-5216.
• Previously, when a restore failed to activate and recreate a deferred index, typically because of insufficient
temporary disk space, gbak would return a non-zero completion code (“FAIL”) only when the failure affected
a referential constraint. Now, gbak returns a fail code for any index that fails the activate-and-rebuild step.
This improvement should be particularly helpful where backups and restores are managed using scripts,
enabling indexes left inactive after the restore to be caught and corrected.
Firebird 2.5.5 Sub-release
This sub-release comes with a moderate collection of bugs fixed over the past six months or so.
Vlad Khorsun's improvement for gbak in Firebird 3.0, producing run-time statistics in the verbose output, was
backported to this v.2.5.5 sub-release. For more information, see Run-time Statistics in Verbose Output and SPB
Support for New Statistics Feature in gbak Output.
One of Firebird's oldest bugs—CORE-214—was finally fixed: COUNT(DISTINCT ...) was too slow (until
now!)
Firebird 2.5 Language Reference
The recently-completed translation of the Firebird 2.5 Language Reference manual from Russian to English is
undergoing technical review as this sub-release is being prepared. Watch the news items at the Firebird website
for the announcement of its release.
Firebird 2.5.4 Sub-release
This sub-release of Firebird 2.5 adds one useful new feature and an improvement in the management of internal
BLOBs:
• From this sub-release forward, it is now possible to perform table and index validation whilst the database
is on-line.
For details, refer to the topic Perform Some Validation Services On-line in the chapter entitled Changes to
the Firebird API and ODS.
• (CORE-4671) : Internal BLOBs are released earlier, to free up memory and disk space.
Implemented by Vlad Khorsun
A collection of bugs fixed since the v.2.5.3 sub-releases is described here.
General Notes
4
Firebird 2.5.3 Security Update 1
The Superserver and Superclassic servers could crash with a segmentation fault caused by a malformed network
packet, opening a vulnerability. It does not affect the Classic server.
The vulnerability was patched by Alex Peshkov. All Firebird Superserver and Superclassic binaries released
with build numbers 26778 or lower and all SS and SC snapshot builds before 2014.12.03 have this vulnerability.
Firebird 2.5.3 Sub-release
Warning re Databases Created or Restored under Firebird 2.5.1
All users upgrading from Firebird 2.5.1 to a higher sub-release are strongly advised to migrate databases using
gbak backup/restore. If this is impracticable, at least rebuild all compound indices in the databases being
migrated.
Databases being upgraded from older Firebird versions (ODS 11.1 and lower) or v.2.5.0 are not affected by
this regression.
This sub-release of Firebird 2.5 adds no new features but includes a large collection of bug fixes that have
accumulated since V.2.5.2. A few minor improvements appear in this sub-release, viz.
• New context variables have been added to the SYSTEM namespace to retrieve more information about the
current connection and current transaction.
The added variables: SYSTEM::CLIENT_PID and SYSTEM::CLIENT_PROCESS for the current connection,
SYSTEM::LOCK_TIMEOUT and SYSTEM::READ_ONLY for the current transaction.
• Some limits have increased:
- The maximum number of connections on Windows for Superserver and Superclassic has been raised from
1024 to 2048 connections.
- The maximum number of input parameters for external functions (UDFs) has increased to 15.
• Error reporting improvements, including:
- More details are now reported for “object in use” errors.
- The relation name is now added to the text of validation constraint error messages, to help identify the
error context.
- Error reporting for index and constraint violations has been extended to include the problematic key value.
• Physical backup (using ALTER DATABASE BEGIN/END BACKUP or the nBackup utility) was improved
to speed up extension of the main database file when backup state changes from stalled to merge.
- Contention for the allocation table lock while a database is in the stalled physical backup state has been
reduced.
General Notes
5
- Faster file growth has been enabled on Linux systems that support fallocate().
- Attachments no longer block others when the allocation table is being read for the first time.
• Execution of a SET STATISTICS INDEX statement no longer blocks or slows down concurrent attachments.
• The scan for limbo transactions at the end of a sweep has been improved.
• Support for the UPDATE OR INSERT statement and the RETURNING clause have been implemented for
Embedded SQL (ESQL).
Firebird 2.5.2 Security Update 1
A remote stack buffer overflow was discovered in the Firebird Server during March, 2013, that allows an unauthenticated
user to crash the server and opens a gate for remote code execution.
The vulnerability was patched by Alex Peshkov. All Firebird binaries released with build numbers 26539 or
lower and all snapshot builds before 2013.03.08 have this vulnerability.