Firebird Vulcan Release Notes

On a four-processor SMP box, Firebird Vulcan benchmarks up to about 3.5 times the speed of a single-processor system on cache intensive benchmarks. See the SMP section.

Firebird Vulcan was developed simultaneously on four platforms:

Ports exist to 64-bit MVS UNIX, Itanium, and AIX. See the Portability section.

tests on Win32 demonstrate some performance improvement over Firebird 1.5. See the Performance section.

programs written for Firebird 1.5 work unchanged on Firebird Vulcan, and Firebird Vulcan includes many Firebird 2.0 features. See Compatbility and Portability.

Firebird has three different architectures: SuperServer, classic, and embedded. The different architectures are implemented as conditional compilations of the same code base. SuperServer is identical on all platforms. Classic and embedded have different characteristics on Windows than on other platforms.

Firebird Vulcan refactors the code base so the three architectures are supported by separating the common elements--engine, server, remote interface, external API--and recombining them in different configurations, rather than conditional compilation.

The configurations behave the same way on all platforms, and can be mixed on a single platform.

For more information see the Process Architecture chapter.

Firebird Vulcan controls the way databases are accessed through cascading configuration files. The configuration files are upward compatible from the Firebird configuration file, but have significant new capabilities. For more information see the Configuration Files section.

Firebird Vulcan configuration files can specify a per-database source for authentication information. Firebird Vulcan also adds SQL statements to create, update, and drop users. For more information see the User Authentication section.

Firebird Vulcan moves DSQL from outside the engine to inside, making it more efficient, and eliminating duplicate metadata representation. For more information see the SQL Integration section.

Since Firebird Vulcan runs only on platforms that support threading, options in the lock manager for other forms of interprocess communication have been dropped. See the Lock Management section.

The Firebird Vulcan dispatch module can print a session log. The contents of the log are controlled with configuration file parameters. The options are tracing calls, tracing results, or tracing SQL statements. See the Configuration Files section for more information.

Most of the changes to Firebird Vulcan are internal. Their effect on performance and reliability can be measured by client applications, but they don't change the API or other user interfaces. See the Firebird Vulcan Internals section for more information.

Firebird 1.5 uses a separate thread for garbage collection when compiled as SuperServer. Firebird 2.0 uses cooperative garbage collection or a garbage collect thread, or both. The choice is controlled by a configuration option.

Firebird Vulcan uses only cooperative garbage collection.

Different organizations require different levels of user authorization. Firebird Vulcan provides a path to the resolution of this requirement and one implementation of it. For more information see the Configurable Security Managers section.