Firebird Project wishes you a wonderful and prosperous holiday. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2021! 
Take a look at the list of the most important releases, events, articles, news in 2020!
Firebird Releases

• Firebird 4.0 Beta 2, May 2020
• Firebird 3.0.7 October 2020 (earlier in 2020 were 3.0.5 and 3.0.6, both are substituted with 3.0.7)
• Firebird 4.0 RC1 - tag for source code of Release Candidate 1 was put December 31, builds and release notes to be released in January!

Support groups now are at Google Groups
May 2020 – due to the closing of Yahoo Groups, support groups were moved to Google Groups:  

• firebird-support  
• All groups are listed here

Events

• In September 2020 in Brazil took place Firebird Developers Day #17, in the online format (in Portuguese)

Active Telegram channels

• FirebirdSQL (English)  
• Meu querido Firebird SQL (Portuguese)  

Documentation, articles, materials
Documentation

• During 2020, Firebird Documentation was changed from DocBook to Asciidoc, a more convenient and flexible format. Many documents were reviewed and updated: www.firebirdsql.org/en/documentation/ 

Interesting Articles and Videos in 2020

• Net Latency and Firebird Performance 
• Firebird Gbak Tips and Tricks
• Install Firebird on QNAP-NAS
• Interview with Dmitry Yemanov, Firebird Core developer
• Installing Firebird 3 on modern Linux versions: CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 19
• Optimized Firebird configuration files: 2nd edition

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.7 — the latest point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.

This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes.
Binary kits for Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Android platforms are immediately available for download.

All users of Firebird v3.0.6 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to v3.0.7 as soon as possible due to several serious bugs found in v3.0.6 and fixed in this point release.

The firebird-driver package provides official Python Database API 2.0-compliant driver. In addition to the minimal feature set of the standard Python DB API, this driver also exposes the new (interface-based) client API introduced in Firebird 3, and number of additional extensions and enhancements for convenient use of Firebird RDBMS. The driver is written as pure-Python package (requires Python 3.8+) on top of Firebird client library (fbclient.so/dll) using ctypes. Driver supports Firebird version 3.0 and higher.

You can download this driver from PyPI or or install it using pip.

Please note, that FDB driver is now considered as legacy driver, and its development will be discontinued together with 2.5 once Firebird 4.0 will be released later this year.

The driver uses firebird-base package, which is a collection of modules that have general applicability, like extended configuration, context-driven logging and trace/audit, hooks, work with structured binary buffers, extended data structures etc. The driver uses almost all features provided by "base" package, but specifically the use of hook mechanism and context-driven logging and trace/audit are potentially the most valuable improvements.

The firebird-lib package provides extensions to the firebird-driver.
This package provides modules for:

• Work with Firebird database schema.
• Work with Firebird monitoring tables.
• Processing output from gstat Firebird utility.
• Processing Firebird server log.
• Processing output from Firebird server trace & audit sessions.

You can download this library from PyPI or or install it using pip.