Firebird 2.1.3 – Recommended update


Yesterday Firebird 2.1.3 was made public. As with all maintenance releases its focus is stability. A number of bugs are fixed and it is a recommended update for everyone using older versions of the 2.1 series.

Default authentication method changed

The Release Notes is quick to warn about a change that may break current setups: The default authentication method changed from mixed to native. In practice this means that before 2.1.3 you could use both firebird’s native authentication and windows authentication out of the box.

From now on you have to explicitly tell Firebird that you wish to use windows authentication. Simply change the firebird.conf configuration file to:

Authentication = mixed

Lighter nBackup

Prior to 2.1.3 nBackup could exhaust server I/O resources and negatively affect database operation. Starting from Firebird 2.1.3 nBackup is lighter and can be used even when the database is heavily loaded.

Monitoring Fixes

Some fixes are specially important for Sinática Monitor users and anyone that uses monitoring tables frequently.

  • Error “cannot transliterate” would happen when trying to read monitoring tables containing data from an attachment using character set NONE.
  • Possible “clumplet errors” while using monitoring tables in Classic Server Linux.
  • Data instability on monitoring tables while clients were connecting or disconnecting.

Other fixes

The list of bugs fixed is long and it’s easy to see that quality is the Firebird Team’s first objective. Kudos to everyone involved in this release and keep your fingers crossed for Firebird 2.5!

4 Comments to “Firebird 2.1.3 – Recommended update”

  1. [...] Tosi wrote about why is recommended to do the upgrade in a short like review (If you don’t want to parse the changelog yet) [...]

  2. [...] Firebird 2.1.3 package is uploaded to Debian Unstable (Sid) and here is the list of package changes More here and a description of the changes here [...]

  3. [...] Firebird 2.1.3 – Recommended update 2009 18 [...]

  4. [...] Firebird 2.1.3 package is uploaded to Debian Unstable (Sid) and here is the list of package changes More here and a description of the changes here [...]

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