New in Firebird 2.5

Table of Contents

Other New Features

The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally.

Although SQL enhancements are not a primary objective of this release, for the first time, user management becomes accessible through SQL CREATE/ALTER/DROP USER statements and syntaxes for ALTER VIEW and CREATE OR ALTER VIEW are implemented. PSQL improvements include the introduction of autonomous transactions and ability to query another database via EXECUTE STATEMENT.

Other New Features

Administrative Enhancements
Other SQL Language Additions and Enhancements
Data-handling Enhancements
API Additions
International Language Support

Other new features and improvements in this release include:

Administrative Enhancements

System audit tracing and user trace sessions via the Services API, making it possible to monitor and analyse everything going on in a database in real time
New system role RDB$ADMIN in the ODS 11.2 database allows SYSDBA to transfer its privileges to another user on a per-database basis
More information in the monitoring tables
Asynchronous cancellation of connections
Capability for ordinary users to monitor any of their own attachments as well as CURRENT_CONNECTION

Other SQL Language Additions and Enhancements

Regular expression support using the SIMILAR TO predicate
ALTER COLUMN for computed columns
Autonomous transactions within a PSQL module (stored procedure, trigger or dynamically executable PSQL block)
Enhanced access to stored procedures in view definitions
Optional GRANTED BY or GRANTED AS for GRANT and REVOKE statements, enabling the grantor to be a user other than the CURRENT_USER (the default).
REVOKE ALL syntax to dispose of all privileges for a user or role at once
Support for WHERE SOME_COL = ? OR ? IS NULL predications
Removal of “reserved” status for all but a handful of keywords that are not reserved in the SQL standard

Data-handling Enhancements

New built-in functions for converting UUID CHAR(16) OCTETS strings to RFC4122-compliant format and vice versa
Ability to pass 32-bit and 64-bit integers as hexadecimal in numeric literal and X-prefixed binary string literal formats

API Additions

Statements now return an SQL-2003 standard 5-alphanumeric SQLSTATE completion code
New constant DSQL_unprepare available for use with isc_dsql_free_statement for efficient unpreparing of statements

International Language Support

Default COLLATE clause for CREATE DATABASE
Ability to change the default COLLATE for a used character set
GBAK restore switches FIX_FSS_DATA and FIX_FSS_METADATA to restore legacy databases with UNICODE_FSS data and/or metadata correctly without resorting to scripts and manual techniques
Accent-insensitive collation for Unicode