From all of us at Firebird Project, we'd like to wish you a safe and happy holiday season and a peaceful and prosperous new year!

And below is a short overview of Firebird events in 2021:

Major Releases

• June 01 - Firebird 4, the major release with replication and many other changes.

Minor Releases

• Nov 17 - Firebird 3.0.8
• Dec 22 - Firebird 4.0.1

Please note that Firebird 2.5 will be discontinued after the release of Firebird 5 (which is planned for the end of 2022), so please upgrade as soon as possible.

Drivers

• Jaybird: releases 4.0.4 (Oct 2), 4.0.3 (March 20), 3.0.11 (March 20), 4.0.2 (Jan 17), 3.0.10 (Jan 17)
• ADO.NET for Firebird: 8.5 (Aug 20), 8.0.1 (April 07)
• Python: Firebird-Python 1.4 (Dec 16), 1.3.4 (Nov 30), (Sep 14)
• The recent versions of other drivers can be found in the Third-Party Software section.

Documentation

• Feb 24 - Firebird 3.0 Language Reference (English)
• April 21 - Firebird Migration Guide
• Nov 23 - Firebird 3 Sprachreferenz - Language Reference in German
• Dec 24 - Firebird 4 Language Reference (v1.3)

Many thanks to Mark Rotteveel, Martin Köditz, and Denis Simonov!

Books

• Firebird Migration Guide To Firebird 4, by Carlos Cantu, English (Oct 11) and Portuguese (Aug 31)

Articles, Videos, and Online Events

• Jan 9 - Firebird Embedded in a sandboxed MacOS App
• Feb 8 - Interview with Ann Harrison at Developer’s Pub
• March 16 - How Firebird Database Encryption Works
• April 09 - Firebird Performance Newsletter: Issue 1
• Nov 6 - Is Firebird 4 slower than Firebird 3? No, it is not
• Nov 17 - Firebird Developers Day in Brazil Online (Portuguese)
• Dec 15 - Live Q&A with Dmitry Yemanov

If you don't want to miss Firebird releases, articles, and other events, subscribe to our online channels:

• FirebirdSQL Telegram
• FirebirdSQL Page on Facebook
• Firebird SQL Community on LinkedIn

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 4.0.1 — the first point release in the Firebird 4.0 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 and Android platforms are immediately available for download.

Mark Rotteveel, the developer of Firebird JDBC driver Jaybird, has confirmed, that Jaybird does not depend on Log4j 2

Jaybird itself does not depend on Log4j 2.x, and as such is not directly affected by the recent Log4j 2 CVEs (but do check "Indirect risks" below). 

Jaybird 3 and higher by default use java.util.logging to log information. Jaybird 2.2 and earlier (all end-of-life) have an *optional* dependency on Log4j 1.x (which is not affected by the recent CVEs). This is only used when explicitly included on the classpath, and enabled using the system property FBLog4j or org.firebirdsql.jdbc.useLog4j[1]. This option was removed in Jaybird 3.

Indirect risks

If you're redirecting logging to Log4j 2 (e.g. from java.util.logging, or using a custom implementation of org.firebirdsql.logging.Logger), you may be vulnerable. If your applications are using Log4j 2, please make
sure to update to Log4j 2.17.0.