Firebird 2.5.1 Release (September 2011)

The months that have passed since the initial release have seen numerous Tracker issues tackled to address things that have been reported broken, bent or compromised in v.2.5. As well as a long list of bug fixes, a few minor improvements have been made. In summary:

The SQLSTATE code has been made available as a PSQL context variable, for use in WHEN .. exception blocks, in the same manner as GDSCODE and SQLCODE
Now it is possible to write to global temporary tables in a read-only database
Diagnostics for internal trace errors were improved
The fbtracemgr utility will now do a periodic flush to output
Performance of gbak restore at the data insertion stages has improved
Conversions between BLOBs and other data types can now be effected in the API functions
The Services API now supports the “metadata-only” restore
A “silent install” switch has been implemented for make install on POSIX
The unused bytes of VARCHAR values in the message buffer are now set to zero
The actual record compression ratio is now estimated in the optimizer
The MON$STATEMENT_ID value now stays constant among monitoring snapshots
The SO_KEEPALIVE option on the client TCP socket will now be set, as a measure to guard against aggressive timing out of sockets by newer Windows systems
Lock Manager can now cancel waits that become interminable
A platform port of v.2.5.1 for HPPA has been done for both Linux and Alpha