Firebird 2.5.2 Sub-release

An important change was made to the implementation of the GEN_UUID() function to make it comply properly with the requirements of RFC-4122. For more information, refer to this topic.

A bug was corrected that caused faulty byte or character order in the results of the functions CHAR_TO_UUID and UUID_TO_CHAR on big-Endian platforms. This correction will impact code that called those functions on big-Endian hosts in Firebird 2.5 or 2.5.1.

As well as many more bug fixes accumulated over the months since v.2.5.1, this sub-release provides a few minor improvements, particularly of help to administrators. In summary:

Some welcome improvements were made to the Trace services, viz.,
- Sessions can now be configured to log user and automatic sweep activity. Documentation for this option can be found on the Tracker ticket CORE-3656.
- TRACE now produces statistics of actions that happen after a transaction has finished. See Tracker ticket CORE-3598.
- TRACE now provides the ability to log errors that occur in runtime (lock conflicts, key violations, et al.). See Tracker ticket CORE-3539.
It is now possible to use the API to do a remote backup/restore.

See Back Up to or Restore from a Remote Backup File.
A note is now written into firebird.log when an automatic sweep is started.
Support was added for C preprocessor flags in the Firebird build system.