The programme for the Firebird conference is now available. Click on speakers' names to view their profiles and topic outlines. If you are planning to be there (Bergamo, Italy, September 25-27) then this is the last week for Early Bird registration discounts.

New Jaybird 2.1.6 patch release fixes two critical bugs affecting updates on tables having composite primary keys. It also adds support for access to the remote PID and process name in Firebird 2.1 monitoring tables.

Happy birthday, Dmitry!

More than 500 participants, including our core team coordinator Dmitry Yemanov, and Dmitry Kuzmenko from IBSurgeon, are now heading to Piracicaba in south-east Brazil for this year's Firebird Developer Day on Saturday.

The Firebird Team announces the release of Firebird 2.1.1, a patch release comprising fixes to bugs that have been reported since the v.2.1 release back in April. Download kits are available for Windows and Linux 64-bit and 32-bit and for MacOSX 32-bit and 64-bit i86 as well as PowerPC.

The Firebird Team is pleased to let loose the first Alpha of Firebird 2.5, more or less feature-complete and ready to field-test. Kits are available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux. So — please test it well and report your experiences (good or bad) to the Firebird-devel list.

Do make a point of studying the release notes (available on-line and also in the download kits) as V.2.5 is to be a macro release introducing the architecture that will progress into Firebird 3 as full support for fine-grained multi-threading and SMP.

Firebird is again in the running for Sourceforge Community Choice awards. This year we have nominations in 3 categories: Best Project, Best Project for Enterprise and Most Likely to be the Next $1B Acquisition (yes, indeedy!). We scored two awards last year, along with a generous donation from the Sourceforge parent company. It all helps, folks, so roll along to the voting site with your SF username and password at the ready and let's see if we can do it again. Results announced later this month at OSCON.

The Firebird Documentation Project coordinator (Paul Vinkenoog) is pleased to announce that the first volume of the Firebird Language Reference Update series, for Firebird 1.0.x and 1.5.x, is now available in both HTML and PDF formats. Other volumes will follow, each encompassing a macro release. Translations are under way.

"Work-in-Progress" release notes for the forthcoming Firebird 2.5 Alpha are available for browsing online.