JBake

Jaybird 6.0.4 and Jaybird 5.0.11 released

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 6.0.4 and Jaybird 5.0.11, providing bug fixes. Jaybird is the Firebird JDBC driver.

Changes

The following was fixed or changed since Jaybird 6.0.3:

Fixed: Statement close of a leaked statement by the cleaner did not detect fatal connection errors (#879)
Fixed: Statement.cancel() causes lockup (#892)
Fixed: Negative buffer size on Firebird 2.5 if information response is 32KiB or greater (#895)
Fixed: FBServiceManager.getAuthPlugins() reported the dbCryptConfig value (#901)
Dependency update: updated net.java.dev.jna:jna-jpms from 5.17.0 to 5.18.1 (used by jaybird-native) (#910)
Dependency update: updated org.bouncycastle:bcprov-jdk18on from 1.81 to 1.83 (used by chacha64-plugin) (#912)
Fixed: FBDatabaseMetaData.getJDBCMinorVersion() should report 4 (for JDBC 4.4) on Java 24 and higher (#913)

The following was fixed or changed since Jaybird 5.0.10:

Backported fatal error detection improvements for FBPooledConnection from Jaybird 6 (#899)
Fixed: FBServiceManager.getAuthPlugins() reported the dbCryptConfig value (#902)
Fixed: Statement.cancel() causes lockup (#904)
Fixed: Incomplete detection of fatal connection errors for deferred actions (#905)
Dependency update: updated net.java.dev.jna:jna from 5.17.0 to 5.18.1 (used by native and embedded protocols) (#911)
Fixed: FBDatabaseMetaData.getJDBCMinorVersion() should report 4 (for JDBC 4.4) on Java 24 and higher (#914)

Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to Firebird-java or reported on the issue tracker https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/issues.

Jaybird 6.0.4

Jaybird 6 supports Firebird 3.0 and higher, on Java 17, Java 21, and Java 25.

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.11

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, Java 11, Java 17, Java 21, and Java 25 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 6.0.2 and Jaybird 5.0.8 released

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 6.0.2 and Jaybird 5.0.8. Both releases provide support for upcoming Firebird 5.0.3 inline blobs, and some other improvements.

For more information on inline blobs, for Firebird 5.0.3 and higher, see also New Article: Data access methods used in Firebird.

Changes

The following was fixed or changed since Jaybird 6.0.1 / Jaybird 5.0.7:

Improvement: added authPlugins property on FBManager (#866 / #865)
Improvement: increased default and maximum SQL info sizes used for retrieving statement information like columns, parameters and plan information (#869 / #868)
Improvement: backported inline blob support (Firebird 5.0.3 and higher) from Jaybird 7 (#870 / #871)
Improvement: The time zone mapping was updated (#874 / #875)

Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to Firebird-java or reported on the issue tracker https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/issues.

Jaybird 6.0.2

Jaybird 6 supports Firebird 3.0 and higher, on Java 17, Java 21, and Java 24.

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.8

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, Java 11, Java 17, Java 21, and Java 24 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 6.0.1 and Jaybird 5.0.7 released

Fri, 4 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 6.0.1 and Jaybird 5.0.7. Both releases provide a number of performance improvements to blob handling, and some bug fixes.

We plan to offer more blob performance improvements in upcoming releases of Jaybird 5 and 6, for Firebird 5.0.3 and higher (see also New Article: Data access methods used in Firebird).

Jaybird 6.0.1

The following was fixed or changed since Jaybird 6.0.0:

Improvement: backported deferred blob open optimization from Jaybird 7 (#842)
Fixed: NullPointerException in getGeneratedKeys() with blob columns after (auto)commit (#846)
Fixed: Fetch response with status=0 (FETCH_OK) and count=0 was logged on DEBUG as an unexpected response (#848)
Improvement: backported fetching all known blob info items on open from Jaybird 7 (#852)
Dependency update: updated net.java.dev.jna:jna-jpms from 5.16.0 to 5.17.0 (used by jaybird-native) (#854)
Dependency update: updated org.bouncycastle:bcprov-jdk18on from 1.79 to 1.80 (used by chacha64-plugin) (#856)

Jaybird 6 supports Firebird 3.0 and higher, on Java 17, Java 21, and Java 24.

Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to Firebird-java or reported on the issue tracker https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/issues.

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.7

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 5.0.6:

Improvement: backported deferred blob open optimization from Jaybird 7 (#841)
Fixed: NullPointerException in getGeneratedKeys() with blob columns after (auto)commit (#846)
Fixed: Fetch response with status=0 (FETCH_OK) and count=0 was logged on DEBUG as an unexpected response (#848)
Improvement: backported performance improvements for blob reading and writing from Jaybird 6 (#850)
Improvement: backported fetching all known blob info items on open from Jaybird 7 (#852)
Dependency update: updated net.java.dev.jna:jna-jpms from 5.15.0 to 5.17.0 (used by native and embedded protocols) (#855)

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, Java 11, Java 17, Java 21, and Java 24 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to Firebird-java or reported on the issue tracker https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/issues.

See also:

Jaybird 6.0.0 released

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 6.

Jaybird 6 is — from a JDBC perspective — an incremental change from Jaybird 5. However, internally, Jaybird underwent some major changes, the biggest was splitting off the native and embedded protocols to a separate plugin artifact (jaybird-native).

What’s new

The major changes and new features in Jaybird 6 are:

Minimum supported Java version is Java 17.
See Java support for more information.
Minimum supported Firebird version is Firebird 3.0.
See Firebird support for more information.
The pure Java protocol — by default --no longer connects to Firebird 2.5 and older, as those versions are not supported.
See Pure Java will not connect to unsupported Firebird versions by default for more information.
The native and embedded protocols have been moved to a separate artifact, jaybird-native.
See NATIVE and EMBEDDED support moved to a separate artifact for more information.
OOREMOTE (OpenOffice/LibreOffice protocol) removed
Modularization of Jaybird
Connection property createDatabaseIfNotExist
Report actual process ID (pid)
Logging facade removed
Support for ChaCha64 wire encryption
Opt-in feature for package information in DatabaseMetaData
Asynchronous fetching
Blob performance improvements
Support for executing transaction management statements
Configurable buffer sizes for the wire protocol
Broken connection detection for event manager
Connection property to specify native library path
Rewritten client info properties support
TIMESTAMP fields now accept LocalDate and LocalTime
ResultSet in auto-commit no longer closed after last row
Changes to behaviour of updatable scrollable result sets
Custom socket factory for pure Java connections
… and other fixes and changes

Upgrading from Jaybird 5 should be straightforward, but please make sure to read Compatibility changes before using Jaybird 6. If you’re using Jaybird with the native or embedded connections, you will need to make some additional changes. See also Upgrading from Jaybird 5 to Jaybird 6.

Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to the Firebird-java mailing list or reported on the issue tracker https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/issues.

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.6 released

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 5.0.6.

The following has been fixed since Jaybird 5.0.5:

Fixed: Exceptions during statement execution did not always complete the statement, which could delay transaction commit in auto-commit mode (#806)
Fixed: Closing a connection when the database was shutdown, or the connection was otherwise broken, could result in a NullPointerException (#812)
Fixed: Error “Column unknown; IND.RDB$CONDITION_SOURCE” when calling DatabaseMetaData.getIndexInfo on Firebird 5.0 with a Firebird 4.0 (ODS 13.0) database (#813)
Fixed: Calling ResultSet.wasNull() when on the insert-row throws a SQLException instead of reporting the null-state of the last retrieved column (#816)
Fixed: Inserting a row into a result set backed by a server-side scrollable cursor could include the inserted row twice (#819)
Improvement: Updated JNA dependency to version 5.15.0 (#823)

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, 11, 17, 21, and 23 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.5 released

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 5.0.5.

The following has been fixed since Jaybird 5.0.4:

Fixed: FBResultSetMetaData.getPrecision would always estimate the precision of NUMERIC or DECIMAL columns instead of obtaining the actual precision if the column position was 71 or higher (#731)
Optimized the query to retrieve extended field info for ResultSetMetaData.getPrecision to only retrieve columns of type NUMERIC or DECIMAL (#732)
Fixed: PreparedStatement.executeBatch() of statement without parameters throws “Statement used in batch must have parameters [SQLState:07001, ISC error code:335545186]” on Firebird 4.0 or higher (#788)
New feature: ResultSetMetaData.isAutoIncrement(int) reports true for identity columns if Jaybird can identify the underlying table and column (#793)
New feature: Boolean connection property extendedMetadata (default true) to disable querying of extended metadata for getPrecision(int) and isAutoIncrement(int) of ResultSetMetaData (#795)
Improvement: The FILTER_CONDITION of DatabaseMetaData.getIndexInfo is populated for Firebird 5.0 partial indices (#797)
Fixed: ResultSet.isBeforeFirst() and ResultSet.isAfterLast() should always report false for an empty result set (#807)
Improvement: Statement.getResultSet no longer throws a SQLException with message “Only one result set at a time/statement” if the current result set has already been returned by executeQuery or a previous call to getResultSet (#762)
Improvement: Updated JNA dependency to version 5.14.0 (#810)

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, 11, 17, 21, and 22 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Installing Firebird 3 on Xubuntu

Fri, 5 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200

A recent question on firebird-support about using Firebird on Xubuntu, and the problems the asker ran into, lead me to trying it out myself. This post is basically a collection of the steps I took to get Firebird up and running on Xubuntu.

I’m usually a Windows user, and although I have collected some Linux knowledge over the years, I’m far from an expert. In other words, this might not be the optimal to do things.

Preparing the VM

To start, I’m installing Xubuntu as a Hyper-V virtual machine, as it’s included in my Windows 11 Pro installation. If you don’t have Hyper-V, you might be able to use something like Virtual Box.

I downloaded the Xubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) desktop ISO image through https://xubuntu.org/download/#non-lts.

In the Hyper-V Manager, I created a new VM using the "Quick Create" option:

Select the “Local installation source” option and browse to and select the ISO image.
Uncheck the “This machine will run Windows (enables Windows Secure Boot)” option
Optionally, click on “More options” and set the name and network for the VM (I used the name “Xubuntu 23.10”)
Click “Create Virtual Machine” to start the VM and start the installation process
Wait for Hyper-V to initialize the VM, and then click on “Connect”
Hyper-V displays a message that the virtual machine is turned off, click on “start”
A Grub (Linux boot loader) window is shown, select the “Try or install Xubuntu” option, or wait for it to start automatically

Installing Xubuntu

Now, the Xubuntu installer allows you to select your language, and either “Try Xubuntu” or “Install Xubuntu”.

Select “Install Xubuntu”
Choose your keyboard layout, and click “Continue”
On the “Updates and other software” screen, leave the defaults as is, and click “Continue”
On the “Installation type” screens, choose the appropriate option for your installation. Given we’re installing a VM, which has its own virtual harddrive, the standard option “Erase disk and install Xubuntu” is good, and click “Install now”
On the “Write the changes to disks” confirm the change by clicking “Continue”
On the “Where are you?” screen select your location (this is for the timezone configuration), and click “Continue”
On the “Who are you?” screen enter the requested information, and click “Continue”

The installation will now install Xubuntu in the VM. This can take a while depending on your machine and internet speed.

After a while, the “Installation Complete” popup will show

Click “Restart Now”, and wait for Xubuntu to start up.
When the VM has restarted, enter the password you set previously to login

Installing Firebird

Now we’re ready to install Firebird.

As I said before, I’m normally a Windows user, so maybe some steps taken are not the optimal way to do things.

We’re going to install Firebird from the terminal.

To start a terminal, press Alt+F2 which will popup the “Application Finder”
Type “term” and select the “xfce4-terminal”, and click “Launch”

Although the latest Firebird version is Firebird 5.0.0, Xubuntu comes with Firebird 3.0.11, through the Ubuntu and ultimately the Debian projects. It is also possible to install Firebird using the installer from the Firebird site, but for this blog, I’m using the package provided by Xubuntu.

Although the terminal is textual, I will show screenshots of terminal output. That is because I’m writing this blog on Windows, and — at least by default — you can’t share the clipboard between the Hyper-V VM and the host, and I’m too lazy to find out if this can be changed or to use an alternative like exchanging files between the VM and the host.

In some cases I do provide textual output, but there I have transcribed the output (possibly with typos), or — for isql output — retried it on Windows and copied and modified the output to match the output in the VM.

First, I’m going to show how you can find what — if any — Firebird packages are available. This might help you if you’re using a future Xubuntu version, which for example might provide Firebird 4.0 or Firebird 5.0 instead of Firebird 3.0

To find packages, you can use apt search. To look for packages with “firebird” in their name or description, enter apt search firebird:

It lists multiple packages, but the ones we’re interested in are the packages starting with “firebird3.0”, and primarily the “firebird3.0-server” package. Some of the other packages, like for example “flamerobin”^[1] might also be of interest to you.
To install a package, you use apt install, but installation requires super user privileges (comparable to Windows Administrator privilege/UAC), so you need to run it with sudo (which means as much as “do as super user”).

Run sudo apt install firebird3.0-server, and when prompted enter your password (the user created by the installer is allowed to elevate its privileges to a super user).
apt will show which packages it will install in addition to firebird3.0-server. Confirm with Enter or enter Y followed by Enter
The installer will prompt for a password for the SYSDBA user (the main administrator account for Firebird).

For purposes of this blog, I’m using the well-known password “masterkey”, but for a real installation, please use a strong password.

You can also let the installer generate a random password for you by leaving the password empty. You can find this password in the /etc/firebird/3.0/SYSDBA.password file. For a secure installation, don’t forget to delete this file later.

Enter a password followed by Enter.
Wait for the install to complete

Using Firebird Server

The Xubuntu “firebird3.0-server” package also installs the “firebird3.0-utils” package, which includes isql-fb, a commandline query tool for Firebird. In a “default” Firebird installation, this tool is actually called isql (short for Interactive SQL), but because other database systems and for example UnixODBC also use a tool called isql, this Debian/Ubuntu/Xubuntu package renamed it to isql-fb.

For more information on isql/isql-fb, you can read the Firebird’s isql Interactive SQL Utility manual.

After installation, the Firebird server will have been started automatically, and is ready for immediate use.

File and directory layout

The layout of files for the Xubuntu Firebird installation differs from “default” Firebird installations.

The location of some important files:

Configuration files like firebird.conf, databases.conf, etc: /etc/firebird/3.0/
Security database: /var/lib/firebird/3.0/system/security3.fdb
Log file: /var/log/firebird/firebird3.0.log

The default expectation of the Xubuntu package is that you put (server-based) database files in /var/lib/firebird/3.0/data. If you want to put it somewhere else, make sure the directory is owned by the user firebird, and — optionally, but recommended — the group firebird.

Unfortunately, specifying a relative path when creating a database puts it in /tmp, so make to sure to specify an absolute path, or define an alias in /etc/firebird/3.0/databases.conf before creating the database.

A simple example of creating a database through the localhost Firebird server:

mark@xubuntu2310-vm:~$ isql-fb -user sysdba -f stdin
Enter password:
Use CONNECT or CREATE DATABASE to specify a database
SQL> create database 'localhost:/var/lib/firebird/3.0/data/testdatabase.fdb' default character set UTF8;
SQL>

Stopping and starting Firebird server

You can stop and start the Firebird server in two ways:

Stop: /etc/init.d/firebird3.0 stop
Start: /etc/init.d/firebird3.0 start

This will call systemctl of the next option.
Stop: systemctl stop firebird3.0.service
Start: systemctl start firebird3.0.service

Both options will prompt you for your password through a popup, or you can run the command with sudo to get the prompt in the terminal.

Using Firebird Embedded

Firebird also comes with an embedded mode, which allows you to access databases without going through Firebird server. However, using Firebird Embedded does require some care, because by default it will share things like lock files and temporary directories with the normal Firebird installation (and this is recommended!).

Given the privileges required to access those directories, for normal Firebird Embedded usage, this means that you need to add yourself to the firebird group.

Run sudo usermod -a -G firebird <your-username>

Next run newgrp firebird to make the additional group privileges available to your user account

The command newgrp firebird only has effect in your current terminal. As long as you don’t log out and log back in, you will need to run newgrp firebird in each new terminal you open!

If you expect to start a lot of different terminals, you may want to log out and log back in before continuing, as it removes the need for using newgrp.

Example connecting using Firebird Embedded to the database created previously:
```
mark@xubuntu2310-vm:~$ isql-fb -user sysdba /var/lib/firebird/3.0/data/testdatabase.fdb
Database: /var/lib/firebird3.0/data/testdatabase.fdb, User: SYSDBA
SQL>
```
The difference with connecting through the server is that we don’t specify a hostname, and we only need to specify a username, and no password. The fact that you have filesystem access to the database is considered sufficient authorization to access the database. The username is used to determine which privileges and roles you have available within the database.

Creating a database in your home directory

When using Firebird Embedded, you can also create databases in your home directory. These databases will only be accessible by your user account (unless you compromise security by giving the firebird user and/or group access to your home directory, which you should not do).

mark@xubuntu2310-vm:~$ isql-fb
Use CONNECT or CREATE DATABASE to specify a database
SQL> create database '/home/mark/personal-database.fdb';
SQL>

You do need to specify the absolute path (or you can use ~ to resolve your home directory). If you don’t specify a username when starting isql-fb or in the CREATE DATABASE statement, it will use your Linux username as the database username:

SQL> select current_user from RDB$DATABASE;

USER
===============================
MARK

SQL>

The End

This concludes the quick tutorial on installing Firebird on Xubuntu. If you want to know more about Firebird, consult the documentation on the Firebird website.

For questions, you can reach out to the community on firebird-support.

1. FlameRobin is a GUI query tool for Firebird

Jaybird 5.0.4 released

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 5.0.4.

The following has been fixed since Jaybird 5.0.3:

Firebird 5.0 is now formally supported
Fixed: Potential NPE when warningMessageCallback is null while reading operations or consuming packets (#778)
Fixed: FBRowUpdater incorrectly considers result set with only partial PK updatable — backported from Jaybird 6 (#780)
Fixed: Use of offset timezone names (e.g. +05:00) for sessionTimeZone would result in a warning being logged, and an incorrect conversion applied (in UTC instead of the offset) when using the legacy time types — backported from Jaybird 6 (#787)

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, 11, 17 and 21 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.3 and 4.0.10 released

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 5.0.3 and Jaybird 4.0.10.

With this release, Jaybird 4 is end-of-life. We recommend upgrading to Jaybird 5.

Jaybird 5.0.3

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 5.0.2:

Improvement: Do not reject attempts to read blob id 0 — backported from Jaybird 6 (#765)

Previously, Jaybird rejected attempts to read blobs with blob id 0 (not on all code paths, for some only when assertions are enabled). Formally, blob id 0 is not a valid blob id, but in practice they can occur (e.g. due to bugs, or access components/drivers explicitly setting a blob column to id 0). Other drivers and tools simply send the requests for blob id 0 to the server, which then treats it as an empty blob. For consistency, we decided to let Jaybird handle it the same.
Fixed: on CHAR fields, a too short value could be returned if the string contained one or more codepoints represented by surrogate pairs and the string length in char exceeded the maximum string length — backported from Jaybird 6 (#770)

We now truncate the returned string if the codepoint count exceeds the maximum string length.
Fixed: CallableStatement.getXXX(String) could return value from wrong column — backported from Jaybird 6 (#772)
Updated: error messages updated from Firebird 5.0.0.1272

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, 11, 17, and 21 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.10

Jaybird 4.0.10 is the last release of Jaybird 4, and Jaybird 4 is now end-of-life. We recommend upgrading to Jaybird 5.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.9

Fixed: Reconnect transaction with a transaction id exceeding 0x7FFF_FFFF did not work (#734)
Fixed: CallableStatement.getXXX(String) could return value from wrong column — backported from Jaybird 6 (#773)
Updated: error messages updated from Firebird 5.0.0.1272

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11, 17, and 21 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Firebird External Table Generator (ext-table-gen) 2.0 released

Sat, 4 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

I am happy to announce the release of version 2.0 of “Firebird External Table Generator” (ext-table-gen for short). (It was released back in September, but I forgot to put up a post on my own website.)

“Firebird External Table Generator” is a commandline tool to transform CSV files to Firebird external table files (a binary format for external table data).

Compared to version 1.0, a lot of new features have been added:

Support for additional data types:
- Integral number types:
  - smallint
  - integer
  - bigint
  - int128
- Exact numeric types (fixed point):
  - numeric
  - decimal
- Datetime types:
  - date
  - time (without time zone)
  - timestamp (without time zone)
Customizing the CSV parser configuration (custom separators, quotes, escapes, etc.)

You can find the 2.0 release at ext-table-gen v2.0.

Documentation and release notes can be found on https://mrotteveel.github.io/ext-table-gen/.

The project itself is hosted on https://github.com/mrotteveel/ext-table-gen.

Firebird External Table Generator (ext-table-gen) 1.0 released

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I am happy to announce the release of “Firebird External Table Generator” (ext-table-gen for short).

“Firebird External Table Generator” is a commandline tool to transform RFC 4180 CSV files to Firebird external table files (a binary format for external table data).

External tables are a good way for bulk-loading data into Firebird. Unfortunately, external tables use a fixed-width binary format, and not (more) standard formats like CSV. It is not always easy to create an appropriate external table file, and this is where ext-table-gen can be used.

At a high level, ext-table-gen provides the following features:

Derive a CHAR-based external table definition (i.e. a CREATE TABLE statement and a configuration for ext-table-gen) from a CSV file
Transform a CSV file to an external table file (either based on the CSV file itself, or based on a configuration file)

The current version only supports CHAR columns, which makes the generated file essentially a fixed-width text format. Future versions may introduce support for additional column types.

You can find the 1.0 release at ext-table-gen v1.0.

Documentation and release notes can be found on https://mrotteveel.github.io/ext-table-gen/.

The project itself is hosted on https://github.com/mrotteveel/ext-table-gen.

Jaybird 5.0.2 released

Wed, 7 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 5.0.2.

The following has been fixed since Jaybird 5.0.1:

Fixed: Reconnect transaction with a transaction id exceeding 0x7FFF_FFFF did not work (jaybird#734)
New feature: add connection property parallelWorkers to set Firebird 5.0 isc_dpb_parallel_workers (jaybird#737)
New feature: add MaintenanceManager.upgradeOds() for the Firebird 5.0 gfix/service repair action to perform a minor ODS upgrade of a database (jaybird#738)
New feature: add parallel workers support for BackupManager (jaybird#739)
New feature: add parallel workers support for sweep in MaintenanceManager (jaybird#740)
Fixed: DatabaseConnectionProperties.setServerBatchBufferSize(int) ignored provided value and always set default (0, or “use server-side maximum”) (jaybird#741)
New feature: add MaintenanceManager.fixIcu() for the Firebird 3.0 gfix/service repair action “ICU” to update or rebuild collations and indexes when the ICU version changed (jaybird#744)
Fixed: The first call to getTableStatistics() of a FBTableStatisticsManager instance returned only a few or even no tables; if no tables were returned, subsequent calls would also return no tables (jaybird#747)

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, 11, 17 and 20 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.1 and 4.0.9 released

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 5.0.1 and Jaybird 4.0.9.

Jaybird 5.0.1

The following has been fixed since Jaybird 5.0.0:

Fixed: Executing DML with a RETURNING clause containing a blob column would return the blob-id instead of the blob value (jaybird#728)
Fixed: CallableStatement.getString and CallableStatement.getObject would incorrectly trim string values (jaybird#729)
Fixed: ResultSetMetaData.getPrecision(int) of a connectionless result set could throw a NullPointerException if the column was of type FLOAT or DOUBLE PRECISION (jaybird#730)

Jaybird 5 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 8, 11, 17 and 19 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.9

The following has been fixed since Jaybird 4.0.8:

Fixed: Some methods of FBClob threw NullPointerException when attempting to use after implicit or explicit free() (jaybird#719)
Improvement: If the default JVM time zone is a GMT offset, e.g. GMT-08:00, configure sessionTimeZone with offset only, e.g. -08:00 (jaybird#720)
Fixed: Executing DML with a RETURNING clause containing a blob column would return the blob-id instead of the blob value (jaybird#728)
Fixed: CallableStatement.getString would incorrectly trim string values (jaybird#729)
Fixed: ResultSetMetaData.getPrecision(int) of a connectionless result set could throw a NullPointerException if the column was of type FLOAT or DOUBLE PRECISION (jaybird#730)

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11, 17 and 19 (support for Java 11 and higher using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.0 released

Mon, 9 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 5.

Jaybird 5 is — from a JDBC perspective — an incremental change from Jaybird 4. However, internally, Jaybird underwent some major changes, the biggest was the removal of JCA (Java Connector Architecture) support.

The major changes and new features in Jaybird 5 are:

Java 7 support dropped
Java Connector Architecture (JCA) support removed
ChaCha wire protocol encryption support (Java 11 and higher only)
Changes to properties
Unification of database and service addressing
Changes to JDBC URL syntax
Removal of LOCAL protocol implementation
Stream blobs are now the default
New parser for generated keys handling (back-ported to Jaybird 4.0.8)
Firebird 4.0 server-side batch updates
Firebird 5.0 multi-row RETURNING support
Firebird Embedded locator service provider (experimental)
Table statistics of a connection (experimental)

See also:

Jaybird 5.0.0-beta-1 released

Tue, 3 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the first beta for Jaybird 5.

We’d really appreciate it if you take the time to test this version of Jaybird with your applications. Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to the firebird-java Google Group or reported on the issue tracker https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/jaybird/issues.

The major changes and new features in Jaybird 5 are:

Java 7 support dropped
Java Connector Architecture (JCA) support removed
ChaCha wire protocol encryption support (Java 11 and higher only)
Changes to properties
Unification of database and service addressing
Changes to JDBC URL syntax
Removal of LOCAL protocol implementation
Stream blobs are now the default
New parser for generated keys handling (back-ported to Jaybird 4.0.8)
Firebird 4.0 server-side batch updates
Firebird 5.0 multi-row RETURNING support
Firebird Embedded locator service provider (experimental)
Table statistics of a connection (experimental)

Jaybird 5.0.0-beta-1 is for testing purposes only, and not intended for production use.

The 5.0.0-beta-1 will have a short life, and we plan to release the GA version mid-January.

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.8 released

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 4.0.8 has been released

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.7:

Improvement: Backported new generated keys parser from Jaybird 5 to remove dependency on ANTLR (jaybird#718)

With this change, Jaybird no longer relies on antlr-runtime-4.7.2.jar, if you don’t need it yourself, you can remove this library from the classpath. See New parser for generated keys handling for more information.

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11, 17 and 19 (support for Java 17 and 19 using the Java 11 version of the driver).

Jaybird 4.0.7 released

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 4.0.7 has been released

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.6:

Improvement: (VAR)CHAR is now sent to the server with blr_varying2 or blr_text2 which includes the character set information (jaybird#692)
Changed: Usages of String.toUpperCase and String.toLowerCase now use Locale.ROOT to prevent locale-sensitivity issues (jaybird#697)
New feature: Support for NBackup "clean history" option (jaybird#706)

The org.firebirdsql.management.NBackupManager interface has three new methods: setCleanHistory(boolean) to enable (or disable) cleaning of history during backup, and setKeepDays(int) and setKeepRows(int) to specify the number of days or rows to keep history. These options require Firebird 4.0.3 or higher.
This feature was backported from Jaybird 5.
Fixed: Calling PreparedStatement.setClob or PreparedStatement.setBlob with a null Clob, Reader, Blob, or InputStream would result in a NullPointerException (jaybird#712)

As part of this change the behaviour of setClob methods accepting a Reader was changed to be identical to setCharacterStream, and setBlob accepting an InputStream to setBinaryStream. The end result before and after this change is identical, but it can result in different memory and performance characteristics, as the stream is now consumed on execute, and not on set.

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11, 17 and 19 (support for Java 17 and 19 using the Java 11 version of the driver).

Jaybird 4.0.6 released

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Jaybird 4.0.6 has been released

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.5:

Improvement: Connection.isValid(int) now uses the timeout as a network timeout, if possible (jaybird#685)

This is only supported for pure Java connections. For native connections, the timeout is ignored (and a SQLWarning is registered).
NativeResourceUnloadWebListener would fail in Servlet containers with a NoClassDefFoundError if JNA wasn’t on the classpath (jaybird#686)
Fixed: Calling isBeforeFirst(), isAfterLast(), isFirst(), or isLast() on a closed result set resulted in a NullPointerException instead of a SQLException (jaybird#689)

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 17 (support for Java 17 using the Java 11 version of the driver).

Jaybird 4.0.5 and 3.0.12 released

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 4.0.5 and 3.0.12 have been released. Jaybird 3.0.12 is the final release of Jaybird 3.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.4 and 3.0.11:

Fixed: JnaService implementation call to isc_service_query incorrectly includes type (jaybird#678)

Jaybird 4.0.5

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 17 (support for Java 17 using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.12

Jaybird 3 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11, and 17. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

With the release of 3.0.12, Jaybird 3 is now end-of-life, and we recommend upgrading to Jaybird 4.

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.4 released

Sat, 2 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Jaybird 4.0.4 has been released.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.3:

Fixed: ResultSet.updateRow() sets fields to null in result set only (jaybird#37)
New feature: Support for NBackup GUID-based backup and in-place restore (jaybird#672)
Fixed: Logic error could lead to incorrect logging of "Specified statement was not created by this connection" (jaybird#674)
Changed: Updated Firebird 4.0 reserved words based on 4.0.0.2496 (jaybird#597)
Fixed: Protocol 15 and 16 had same priority, so Firebird 4.0 might select protocol 15, leading to timeout support not available. (jaybird#676)

Jaybird 4.0.4

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 17 (support for Java 17 using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Archive of old Firebird Yahoo Groups

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0200

In December 2019, Yahoo shutdown the online archive of Yahoo Groups. At that time I had created a backup of all Firebird groups I had access to. I finally got around to publishing it online.

You can find the archive at http://fb-list-archive.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/. Update 2026-01-29: the archive has been moved to https://fb-list-archive.lawinegevaar.nl/ (the old URL will redirect for the time being).

The archive contains all posts up to the 14th of December 2019.

I’ll try to also add the posts sent between the shutdown of the archive and the shutdown of Yahoo Groups at the end of 2020 at some time in the future.

Jaybird 4.0.3 and 3.0.11 released

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 4.0.3 and 3.0.11 have been released.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.2 and 3.0.10:

Changed: Closing a statement will now be sent to the server immediately (JDBC-638)

Jaybird 4.0.3

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 15 (support for Java 15 using the Java 11 version of the driver); Java 16 has not been fully tested yet.

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.11

Although Jaybird 3 is still maintained, we recommend upgrading to Jaybird 4.

Jaybird 3 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 15; Java 16 has not been fully tested yet. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.2 and 3.0.10 released

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 4.0.2 and 3.0.10 have been released.

Jaybird 4.0.2

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.1:

Fixed: First letter of JDBC escape was case-sensitive (JDBC-632)
Fixed: Some usernames cannot authenticate using SRP (JDBC-635)
Fixed: ServiceConfigurationError while loading plugins could prevent Jaybird from loading (JDBC-636)

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 15 (support for Java 15 using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.10

Although Jaybird 3 is still maintained, we recommend upgrading to Jaybird 4.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 3.0.10:

Added: A static utility method FBDriver.normalizeProperties which, given a JDBC url and a Properties object, returns a Map<String, String> containing the merged properties normalized to the common property name. (JDBC-627)
Fixed: Use of isc_dpb_no_db_triggers no longer logs a warning (JDBC-628)
Fixed: First letter of JDBC escape was case-sensitive (JDBC-632)
Fixed: Some usernames cannot authenticate using SRP (JDBC-635)
Fixed: ServiceConfigurationError while loading plugins could prevent Jaybird from loading (JDBC-636)

Jaybird 3 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 15. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.1 released

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0200

Jaybird 4.0.1 has been released. Jaybird 4.0.1 is the first maintenance release of Jaybird 4, and introduces support for INT128 (a new type in Firebird 4), improves support for the Firebird 4 WITH TIME ZONE types by adding support for java.time.ZonedDateTime and making some of the derivation rules more consistent with Firebird. It also provides some bug fixes and other changes.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.0

Fixed: Changes to the transaction configuration (transaction parameter buffer configuration) of one connection are no longer propagated to other connections with the same connection properties (JDBC-386)
Fixed: Search index of Javadoc in Java 11 version used incorrect links (JDBC-619)
Fixed: The cleanup of native resources didn’t dispose the native library held by JNA, as a change in implementation no longer allowed directly access to the JNA NativeLibrary (JDBC-620)
Fixed: When updating a row through an updatable result set, selected but not updated blob fields were set to NULL (JDBC-623)
Added: Support for type INT128 (reported as JDBC type NUMERIC) (JDBC-624)
See also Firebird 4 INT128 support.
Added: A static utility method FBDriver.normalizeProperties which, given a JDBC url and a Properties object, returns a Map<String, String> containing the merged properties normalized to common property name. (JDBC-627)
Fixed: Use of isc_dpb_no_db_triggers no longer logs a warning (JDBC-628)
Incompatible change: While making changes to time zone support, the API of org.firebirdsql.gds.ng.tz.TimeZoneDatatypeCoder was made almost entirely private. This should not affect normal user code.
Although we try to avoid these types of incompatible changes in point releases, we explicitly allow them for the org.firebirdsql.gds.ng package and sub-packages.
Changed: conversions from TIME WITH TIME ZONE now use 2020-01-01 as base date for named zones (JDBC-629)
New feature: Added support for java.time.ZonedDateTime for the WITH TIME ZONE types (JDBC-630)
Fixed: Connection.setNetworkTimeout incorrectly used the provided Executor to set the timeout (JDBC-631)

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 14 (using the Java 11 version of the driver).

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.9 released

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:00 +0200

Jaybird 3.0.9 has been released. This release contains the following changes:

Fixed: changes to the transaction configuration (transaction parameter buffer configuration) of one connection are no longer propagated to other connections with the same connection properties (JDBC-386)
New feature: Firebird 4 data type bind configuration support (JDBC-603)
New feature: Jaybird now supports UTF-8 URL encoding for connection properties in the JDBC url. (JDBC-604)
Fixed: When updating a row through an updatable result set, selected but not updated blob fields were set to NULL (JDBC-623)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 14. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.0 released

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 4.

Jaybird 4 is - compared to Jaybird 3 - an incremental release that builds on the foundations of Jaybird 3. The focus of this release has been on further improving JDBC support and adding support for the new data types and features of Firebird 4.

The main new features are:

Wire encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Database encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Wire compression support
Authentication plugin improvements
Firebird 4 data type bind configuration support (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
Firebird 4 DECFLOAT support
Firebird 4 extended numeric precision support
Firebird 4 time zone support
Firebird 4 statement timeout support (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
JDBC RowId support
DatabaseMetaData getPseudoColumns implemented
DatabaseMetaData getVersionColumns implemented
DatabaseMetaData getFunctions implemented (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
DatabaseMetaData getFunctionColumns implemented (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
Improved JDBC function escape support
New JDBC protocol prefix jdbc:firebird:
URL encoding in query part of JDBC URL (backported to Jaybird 3.0.9)
Generated keys support improvements
Operation monitoring

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2 released

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the second beta for Jaybird 4.

We’d really appreciate it if you take the time to test this version of Jaybird with your applications. Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to the Firebird-java mailing list or reported on the issue tracker http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/browse/JDBC.

The main new features are:

Wire encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Database encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Wire compression support
Authentication plugin improvements
Firebird 4 data type bind configuration support (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
Firebird 4 DECFLOAT support
Firebird 4 extended numeric precision support
Firebird 4 time zone support
Firebird 4 statement timeout support (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
JDBC RowId support
DatabaseMetaData getPseudoColumns implemented
DatabaseMetaData getVersionColumns implemented
DatabaseMetaData getFunctions implemented (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
DatabaseMetaData getFunctionColumns implemented (since Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2)
Improved JDBC function escape support
New JDBC protocol prefix jdbc:firebird:
URL encoding in query part of JDBC URL (backported to Jaybird 3.0.9)
Generated keys support improvements
Operation monitoring

Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-2 is for testing purposes only, and not intended for production use.

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.8 released

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 3.0.8 has been released. This release contains one bug fix:

Fixed: On Firebird 3 and 4 with WireCrypt = Enabled, the connection could hang or throw exceptions like "Unsupported or unexpected operation code". (JDBC-599)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 13. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.7 released

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Jaybird 3.0.7 has been released. This release contains a new feature and two bug fixes:

Fixed: attempts to use a blob after it was freed or after transaction end could throw a NullPointerException or just work depending on whether the connection had a new transaction. (JDBC-587)
Fixed: Instances of java.sql.Blob and java.sql.Clob obtained from a result set were freed after calls to ResultSet.next(). (JDBC-588)
New feature: added FBEventManager.createFor(Connection) to create an EventManager for an existing connection. Backported from Jaybird 4. (JDBC-594)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 13. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Firebird support in Flyway

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0200

Flyway is a database migration (versioning) tool that supports a wide variety of database systems. Recently, they accepted my pull request to add support for Firebird in Flyway 6.0. Although my pull request supported Firebird 2.1 and higher, the Flyway team has decided to only support Firebird 3 and higher. I assume this was decided as Firebird 2.5 and earlier are all end-of-life.

At this time, the release of Flyway 6.0 has not been announced yet, but it is already available from Maven central.

Flyway provides a number of ways to migrate database:

Personally, I prefer to use the Java API to migrate the database from within an application. However, that solution requires the application to have access to credentials with sufficient rights in the database, which isn’t alway an option. Depending on your deployment model, it might be better to provide a separate application or use one of the other three options to migrate a database.

I will show a small example of use of Flyway with Firebird 3 below. Be sure to read Flyway’s Get Started and Flyway’s documentation for more information and an overview of all features. This example doesn’t cover all options available.

In its current form, the example does what is better done using the command-line or the Maven or Gradle plugins. Consider it a stepping stone for a migration feature as part of a bigger application.

Using Flyway with a Firebird database

This example will use Gradle as its build and dependency tool, and for running the example.

The full code of the example is available from https://github.com/mrotteveel/firebird-flyway-example.

build.gradle

plugins {
    id 'java'
    id 'application'
}

group 'nl.lawinegevaar'
version '1.0-SNAPSHOT'

sourceCompatibility = 1.8

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    implementation 'org.firebirdsql.jdbc:jaybird-jdk18:3.0.6'
    implementation 'org.flywaydb:flyway-core:6.0.0'
}

application {
    mainClassName = 'nl.lawinegevaar.firebird.flyway.example.Main'
}

To execute the migrations, we’ll use the following simple main class.

Main

package nl.lawinegevaar.firebird.flyway.example;

import org.flywaydb.core.Flyway;

import java.io.IOException;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        DatabaseProperties databaseProperties = DatabaseProperties.loadDefault();
        migrateDatabase(databaseProperties);
    }

    private static void migrateDatabase(DatabaseProperties databaseProperties) {
        Flyway flyway = Flyway.configure()
                .dataSource(
                        databaseProperties.getUrl(),
                        databaseProperties.getUser(),
                        databaseProperties.getPassword())
                .load();
        flyway.migrate();
    }
}

This example assumes an existing empty database is used. The database connection information is configured in a database.properties file in src/main/resources. This properties file is accessed through DatabaseProperties.

This simple application can be built and run using Gradle:

./gradlew run

When run without existing migrations, the following logging will be produced: ^[1]

Aug 17, 2019 10:14:15 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.license.VersionPrinter printVersionOnly
INFO: Flyway Community Edition 6.0.0 by Boxfuse
Aug 17, 2019 10:14:16 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.database.DatabaseFactory createDatabase
INFO: Database: jdbc:firebirdsql://localhost/flyway-example.fdb (Firebird 3.0 3.0)
Aug 17, 2019 10:14:16 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbValidate validate
INFO: Successfully validated 0 migrations (execution time 00:00.064s)
Aug 17, 2019 10:14:16 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.schemahistory.JdbcTableSchemaHistory create
INFO: Creating Schema History table "flyway_schema_history" ...
Aug 17, 2019 10:14:16 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate migrateGroup
INFO: Current version of schema "default": << Empty Schema >>
Aug 17, 2019 10:14:16 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate logSummary
INFO: Schema "default" is up to date. No migration necessary.

Flyway has now created a flyway_schema_history table which is used to track the executed migrations.

First migration

Now, lets add a migration to add a simple person table. Flyway uses a naming format with scripts prefixed by a version, followed by a descriptive name. See SQL-based migrations for details.

The file we create is src/main/resources/db/migrations/V1__Create_person_table.sql

V1__Create_person_table.sql

create table PERSON (
    ID int generated by default as identity constraint PK_PERSON primary key,
    NAME varchar(100) not null
);

Executing our program, this now logs:

...
Aug 17, 2019 10:20:24 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbValidate validate
INFO: Successfully validated 1 migration (execution time 00:00.083s)
Aug 17, 2019 10:20:24 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate migrateGroup
INFO: Current version of schema "default": << Empty Schema >>
Aug 17, 2019 10:20:24 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate doMigrateGroup
INFO: Migrating schema "default" to version 1 - Create person table
Aug 17, 2019 10:20:24 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate logSummary
INFO: Successfully applied 1 migration to schema "default" (execution time 00:00.091s)

Second migration

Now, we want to add some data to the person table:

V2__Add_people.sql

insert into PERSON (NAME) values ('Mark');
insert into PERSON (NAME) values ('William');
insert into PERSON (NAME) values ('Andrew');

Running this will produce:

...
Aug 17, 2019 10:26:48 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbValidate validate
INFO: Successfully validated 2 migrations (execution time 00:00.110s)
Aug 17, 2019 10:26:48 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate migrateGroup
INFO: Current version of schema "default": 1
Aug 17, 2019 10:26:48 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate doMigrateGroup
INFO: Migrating schema "default" to version 2 - Add people
Aug 17, 2019 10:26:48 AM org.flywaydb.core.internal.command.DbMigrate logSummary
INFO: Successfully applied 1 migration to schema "default" (execution time 00:00.047s)

Procedural SQL in a migration

A migration script is a collection of statement separated by a statement terminator, by default this is a semi-colon (;). To be able to execute procedural SQL statements (eg create procedure or execute block) in a migration, the statement terminator must be changed. To change the statement terminator, the Firebird support in Flyway supports the SET TERM statement that is also used by ISQL and other Firebird tools.^[2]

As an example of creating a stored procedure:

V3__Factorial_procedure.sql

set term #;
create procedure factorial(max_value integer)
  returns (factorial bigint)
as
  declare variable counter integer;
begin
  factorial = 1;
  counter = 0;
  while (counter <= max_value) do
  begin
    if (counter > 0) then
      factorial = factorial * counter;
    counter = counter + 1;
  end
end#
set term ;#

Caveats

Mixing DDL and DML in a single migration

Although Firebird has transactional DDL, it is not possible to use objects created in a transaction in DML in that same transaction. Phrased differently, DML in Firebird can only use objects (tables, columns, etc) as they existed at the start of the transaction. As a result, it is not possible to create a table and in the same migration populate it with data.^[3] You can logically group related DDL and DML together by using minor version numbers in your migration, for example V4_1__Create_department_table.sql and V4_2__Add_departments.sql.

Unsupported statement types

The following statements are not supported as they will invalidate the transaction handle used by Jaybird:

SET TRANSACTION
COMMIT [WORK]
ROLLBACK [WORK]

Dialect 3 only

Flyway uses quoted identifiers for its version table and assumes single quote string literals when parsing scripts. This means that Flyway will only work on dialect 3 databases.

Conclusion

Flyway is a powerful tool to manage changes to your database, and I think it is good news that Firebird is now supported. This example only shows the most basic usage of Flyway, so make sure to read the full documentation so you don’t miss out on other useful features.

If you need help, or more information, ask a question on the Firebird-Java mailinglist. You can subscribe by sending an email to firebird-java-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

1. some warnings produced by Jaybird have been removed

2. SET TERM is not part of the Firebird server statement syntax

3. You can add a COMMIT RETAIN; statement to your script to commit in the middle of a script. This is not recommend as this will break the transactionality of your script, which can result in maintenance and recovery headaches if a script partially succeeds and partially fails

Introducing firebird-testcontainers-java

Sun, 2 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200

I have just released org.firebirdsql:firebird-testcontainers-java:1.0.0, based on Testcontainers.

This library allows you to start a Firebird docker container for a JUnit 4 or 5 test or manually from your code. This can be useful for JUnit-based integration tests.

For a very simple example, add to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.firebirdsql</groupId>
    <artifactId>firebird-testcontainers-java</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.firebirdsql.jdbc</groupId>
    <artifactId>jaybird-jdk18</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.6</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

And create a test:

/**
  * Simple test demonstrating use of {@code @Rule}.
  */
public class ContainerExampleTest {

     @Rule
     public final FirebirdContainer container = new FirebirdContainer();

     @Test
     public void canConnectToContainer() throws Exception {
         try (Connection connection = DriverManager
                 .getConnection(container.getJdbcUrl(), container.getUsername(),
                     container.getPassword());
              Statement stmt = connection.createStatement();
              ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("select CURRENT_USER from RDB$DATABASE")) {
             assertTrue("has row", rs.next());
             assertEquals("user name",
                 container.getUsername().toUpperCase(), rs.getString(1));
         }
     }
}

See https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-testcontainers-java and https://www.testcontainers.org/ for details.

Jaybird 3.0.6 released

Sat, 25 May 2019 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.6.

This release is largely a bugfix release, but contains additional support for Firebird 4.

Jaybird 3.0.6 contains the following fixes and changes:

Fixed: Exceptions during fetch of cached result sets (holdable over commit, scrollable and metadata) prevented prepared statement reuse/re-execute with error "Statement state CURSOR_OPEN only allows next states [CLOSING, PREPARED, ERROR], received EXECUTING" (JDBC-531)
Improvement: Added FBManager.setDefaultCharacterSet to set default database character set during database creation (JDBC-541)
New feature: Support for Firebird 3 case sensitive user names (JDBC-549)
Fixed: Savepoints did not work in connection dialect 1 as savepoint names were always quoted (JDBC-556)
Changed: The DatabaseMetaData statement cache introduced in Jaybird 3 was unlimited, it is now limited to 12 prepared statements; the least recently used statement will be closed and removed when a new statement is added (JDBC-557)
Fixed: UPDATE OR INSERT with existing RETURNING clause handled incorrectly for generated keys (JDBC-566)
Fixed: Exceptions during initialization of result sets would not properly close the database cursor leading to error "Current statement state (CURSOR_OPEN) does not allow call to prepare" on reuse of the statement (or errors similar to described for JDBC-531 above). (JDBC-571)
New feature: boolean connection property ignoreProcedureType to disable usage of metadata for stored procedure types in CallableStatement. When set to true, call escapes and EXECUTE PROCEDURE will default to use EXECUTE PROCEDURE and not switch to SELECT for selectable stored procedures. (JDBC-576)
New feature: connection properties timeZoneBind and sessionTimeZone for limited support for Firebird 4 TIME(STAMP) WITH TIME ZONE types, and decfloatBind for limited support for Firebird 4 DECFLOAT types. (JDBC-538)
Fixed: Connection property defaultIsolation/isolation did not work through DriverManager, but only on DataSource implementations. (JDBC-584)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9 and higher. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-1 released

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the first beta for Jaybird 4.

We’d really appreciate it if you take the time to test this version of Jaybird with your applications. Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated. Feedback can be sent to the Firebird-java mailing list or reported on the issue tracker http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/browse/JDBC.

The main new features are:

Wire encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Database encryption support (backported to Jaybird 3.0.4)
Authentication plugin improvements
Firebird 4 DECFLOAT support
Firebird 4 extended numeric precision support
Firebird 4 time zone support
JDBC RowId support
JDBC DatabaseMetaData.getPseudoColumns implemented
JDBC DatabaseMetaData.getVersionColumns implemented
Improved JDBC function escape support
New JDBC protocol prefix jdbc:firebird:
Generated keys support improvements

Jaybird 4.0.0-beta-1 is for testing purposes only, and not intended for production use.

See also:

Jaybird 2.2.15 released

Sat, 6 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 2.2.15.

Jaybird 2.2.15 is the last version of Jaybird 2.2.x, and we will not plan new changes or fixes for 2.2.x. This effectively means that Jaybird 2.2.x is End-Of-Life.

If you run into problems, we will recommend that you switch to Jaybird 3 (or 4 once it is released). Contact us on Firebird-Java for questions.

Jaybird 2.2.15 contains the following fixes and changes:

Fixed: Exceptions during fetch of cached result sets (holdable over commit, scrollable and metadata) prevented prepared statement reuse/re-execute with error "Attempt to reopen an open cursor" (JDBC-531)
Fixed: Jaybird cannot parse Firebird version numbers with revisions (JDBC-534)
Fixed: Incorrect parsing of Firebird version numbers (JDBC-535)

Jaybird 2.2 supports Firebird 1.0 and higher, on Java 6, 7 and 8. For Java 11 or higher, use Jaybird 3.

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.5 released

Fri, 7 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.5.

This release is largely a bugfix release, but contains additional support for Firebird 3.0.4 and Firebird 4.

Jaybird 3.0.5 contains the following fixes and changes:

Fixed: FBManager does not accept page size of 32768 (Firebird 4 and higher) (JDBC-468)
Fixed: Jaybird cannot parse Firebird version numbers with revisions (JDBC-534)
Fixed: Incorrect parsing of Firebird version numbers (JDBC-535)
New feature: Added support for the Srp256 authentication plugin (JDBC-536)
Fixed: Incorrect warning "Specified statement was not created by this connection" logged for statements that fail with an exception on prepare (JDBC-538)
Fixed: Remote close of event channel (eg on Firebird server stop or crash) leads to high CPU usage and excessive error logging as socket channel is not removed from selector (JDBC-542)
Fixed: Properties wireCrypt and dbCryptConfig not available on FBEventManager (JDBC-544)
Documentation: wire protocol encryption requires unlimited strength Cryptographic Jurisdiction Policy (or equivalent), this was previously not documented (JDBC-545)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9 and higher. Basic Java 9 and higher compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.4 released

Sat, 5 May 2018 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.4.

This release of Jaybird introduces two new features: wire protocol encryption and database encryption callback support.

Jaybird 3.0.4 contains the following fixes and changes:

New feature: Back-ported wire encryption support from Jaybird 4 (JDBC-415)
Fixed: Native/embedded (JNA) connections truncate varchars to length 255 on read (JDBC-518)
New feature: Database encryption callback support in pure Java protocol (JDBC-527)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9. Basic Java 9 compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Migration steps SourceForge CVS to GitHub

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This post serves as documentation of the steps to migrate the remaining CVS repositories of the Firebird project from SourceForge to GitHub.

General steps

Some steps for the migration are inspired by (or plainly copied from) https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/CVS/

The most important step, the migration itself, is explicitly not taken from the SourceForge documentation, as this turned out to be lossy (several branches were not included in the migration for unclear reasons).

The migration will be done on Windows 10 using Windows Subsystem for Linux with Ubuntu, but these instruction should work on a 'real' Linux install.

Tools to install

Using sudo apt-get install:

cvs (to be able to process the CVS repository)
rcs (for parsing the log files using rlog)
git (obviously)
make (to 'install' cvs2svn)

In a suitable working directory, install the latest development version of cvs2svn (the last released version might run into problems with multi-line commit messages).

# in ~/repomigration
git clone https://github.com/mhagger/cvs2svn.git
cd cvs2svn
sudo make install

Contrary to its name, cvs2svn also provides a conversion tool called cvs2git.

Retrieving and updating the CVS repository

Initial retrieval of CVS repository:

# in ~/repomigration
mkdir cvsrepo
rsync -av firebird.cvs.sourceforge.net::cvsroot/firebird/* ~/repomigration/cvsrepo

Subsequent updates can be retrieved using just:

# in ~/repomigration/cvsrepo
rsync -av firebird.cvs.sourceforge.net::cvsroot/firebird/* ~/repomigration/cvsrepo

Authors

Git uses email addresses as the usernames of committers, while CVS uses just a username. We will first need to obtain all usernames from the repository, and then associate email addresses (and if possible, user names).

For this migration we will associate the original SourceForge usernames with their username@users.sourceforge.net email address. If users want to associate these commits with their GitHub user account, they will need to associate this email address with their GitHub account (as a secondary address)

Get usernames from CVS logs:

for vfile in `find /home/mark/repomigration/cvsrepo -name '*,v'`; do
  rlog $vfile | sed -nr 's/^date:.* author: ([^;]+).*/\1/p'
done | sort -u >~/repomigration/cvs-author-names

Remove the user root if present, and then transform to email addresses and add name information from SourceForge profile in a format that can be applied in the cvs2git options file:

for uname in `cat ~/repomigration/cvs-author-names`; do
  json=`curl https://sourceforge.net/rest/u/$uname/profile`
  fname=`echo "$json" | sed -nr 's/\{"username": "[^"]+", "name": "([^"]+)".*/\1/p'`
  echo "    '$uname' : ('$fname', '$uname@users.sourceforge.net'),"
done >~/repomigration/authors.txt

Review the authors.txt and make changes were necessary (eg maybe some users indicated they want their commits associated with another email address, real names are not present in the source forge profile, etc).

Conversion of a module

Before conversion, make sure the local copy of the repository is up-to-date (using rsync). In the description below, I assume migrating the OdbcJdbc module to git project firebird-odbc-driver.

The cvs2git tool can only do per module conversions. To make migration easier, it is advisable to use an options file, as documented on http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html and http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2git.html.

For our purpose we took a copy of the cvs2git-example.options from the cvs2svn folder created in Tools to install, and made the following modifications. Most of these changes can be used for conversion for all modules, but some settings are per module (or may need some tuning per module).

(optional) Set ctx.tmpdir to a name specific to the module being converted (eg r'/home/mark/repomigration/cvs2git-OdbcJdbc')
Copy the contents of authors.txt to the author_transform list.
(optional) Change the entry 'cvs2git' : 'cvs2git <admin@example.com>' to the domain of your project (in our case I changed the email address to firebird@firebirdsql.org)
In run_options.set_project replace r’test-data/main-cvsrepos' with the path to the module in the repository copy (eg r'/home/mark/repomigration/cvsrepo/OdbcJdbc')
In ctx.cvs_log_decoder uncomment 'latin1' (and maybe 'utf-8') and fallback_encoding='ascii' (especially if you receive warnings about log parsing)
(optional) Change ctx.symbol_info_filename from None to (for example) 'symbol-info.txt', this may help in analyzing and fixing problems with name-conflicts between tags and branches
(optional) Enable changeset_database.use_mmap_for_cvs_item_to_changeset_table (but read the warning in the options file!)
(optional) If you are missing branches, comment out ExcludeTrivialImportBranchRule(), as an example the OdbcJdbc module had a branch that was equal to the original initial commit of the CVS repository, and was therefor excluded by this heuristic
Download http://www.apache.org/dev/svn-eol-style.txt and http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/docs/conf/mime.types and make changes if necessary.
1. Uncomment the AutoPropsPropertySetter (and related lines) and point it to svn-eol-style.txt
2. Uncomment the MimeMapper and point it to mime.types
3. Uncomment the EOLStyleFromMimeTypeSetter
4. Add add from cvs2svn_lib.svn_run_options import SVNEOLFixPropertySetter to the import list at the start, and at the end of ctx.file_property_setters.extend add SVNEOLFixPropertySetter(), to normalize up line-endings (test carefully if you really want to do this)

Be sure to read through the options file documentation, there are some settings you might want to tune further (eg the settings in ctx.file_property_setters.extend for line endings, etc). The cvs2git default behavior leaves the content as originally stored in the CVS repository (aka 'treat everything as binary').

The settings of step 9 have no effect if SVNEOLFixPropertySetter() isn’t added. Be aware that this can introduce issues further down the road, like line-ending changes between commits depending on the platform and configuration of the contributor. This applies especially for files that are prone to require specific line-endings (eg Windows .bat files). It might advisable to add a .gitattributes after migration and update affected files a described on https://www.git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes/.

To convert (replace firebird-odbc-driver.options with your options file)

cvs2git --options=firebird-odbc-driver.options

Conversion can take a while.

Then perform (replace the firebird-odbc-driver and cvs2git-OdbcJdbc with your specific names):

git init firebird-odbc-driver.git
cd firebird-odbc-driver.git
cat ../cvs2git-OdbcJdbc/git-blob.dat ../cvs2git-OdbcJdbc/git-dump.dat | git fast-import
# might fail if this branch doesn't exist
git branch -D TAG.FIXUP
python ~/repomigration/cvs2svn/contrib/git-move-refs.py
# delete branches prefixed `unlabelled-` (old branches that had their name deleted from CVS)
git branch --list 'unlabeled-*' | xargs git branch -D
git gc --prune=now
git repack -a -d -f --depth=50 --window=250

Deleting the unlabeled-* branches may lead to loss of history if those branches were never fully merged back in a still existing branch. However as they had their name deleted in CVS, it was likely that the branch was no longer important. Weigh your options carefully, and keep a backup of the CVS repository!

Verifying contents of repository (replace the firebird-odbc-driver and cvs2git-OdbcJdbc with your specific names):

mkdir /tmp/compare-firebird/
python ~/repomigration/cvs2svn/contrib/verify-cvs2svn.py \
    --git \
    ~/repomigration/cvsrepo/OdbcJdbc/ \
    ~/repomigration/firebird-odbc-driver.git/ \
    --tmp=/tmp/compare-firebird/ \
    --diff

Publishing the repository to GitHub

Create an empty repository on GitHub (replace PROJECT and REPOSITORY with the right values)

git remote add origin git@github.com:PROJECT/REPOSITORY.git
git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master
git push origin --mirror

Make sure your SSH key for GitHub is loaded.

Repository specific steps

OdbcJdbc to firebird-odbc-driver

Add line NetfraRemote.lib = svn:eol-style=CRLF to svn-eol-style.txt in an attempt to fixup an incorrect binary file.

manual to firebird-documentation

After migration and publication to GitHub, checkout on Windows and perform steps:

In branch master and B_Release do:

Create .gitignore with content:

lib/*
!lib/_readme_libs.txt

tools/*
!tools/_readme_tools.txt
!tools/get_tools_linux.sh

dist/
inter/

And then do

git add .
git commit -m "Add .gitignore"
git push

This will ignore the files and folders populated for the build process.

Create .gitattributes with content:

* text=auto
*.xml           text
*.xsl           text
*.docbook       text
*.css           text
*.bat           text    eol=crlf
*.sh            text

*.bmp           binary
*.gif           binary
*.ico           binary
*.jar           binary
*.jpg           binary
*.jpeg          binary
*.png           binary

And then do

git read-tree --empty
git add .
git commit -m "Add .gitattributes and update affected files"
git push

Jaybird with Firebird embedded example

Fri, 8 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0200

I just published a small example program using Firebird 3 Embedded with Jaybird 3. You can find it on https://github.com/mrotteveel/jaybird-embedded-example.

This example is Windows (64 bit) specific, but should easily translate to other platforms (just a matter of including the equivalent libraries in the fb folder).

Running the example

To compile and run the example application from the commandline, use:

gradlew run -Dexec.args="--create"

Or use gradlew build and unzip the distribution in build\distributions and from the unzipped folder execute:

.\bin\embedded-example.bat --create

Specifying the --create option is only necessary on first run to create the (default) database file. See --help for other options.

Details on embedded use

The fb folder of the example program contains all DLL files necessary for Firebird embedded to work:

fb
|--intl
|  |--fbintl.conf
|  \--fbintl.dll
|--plugins
|  |--engine12.dll
|  |--fbtrace.dll
|  |--legacy_auth.dll
|  |--legacy_usermanager.dll
|  |--srp.dll
|  |--udr_engine.conf
|  \--udr_engine.dll
|--fbclient.dll
|--icudt52.dll
|--icudt52l.dll
|--icuin52.dll
\--icuuc52.dll

The fb folder is a trimmed down version of a normal Firebird installation. It is possible that some of the DLLs in the plugins folder are not necessary (this may require tweaking firebird.conf), and error logging suggests it might be necessary to include ib_util.dll as well, but the example program works without it. If you need additional configuration, then you can include a firebird.conf.

By default Jaybird 3 is only able to use the pure Java implementation of the wire protocol. For Jaybird to be able to use Firebird Embedded, you need to do two things:

Include the JNA (Java Native Access) library (version 4.4.0 at time of writing)
Add the fb folder (or equivalent) to the search path for JNA
1. Either specify the jna.library.path system property with the absolute or relative path to the folder
2. Or include the folder on the PATH environment variable
3. Another option is to make the fb folder the current working directory when executing the program, but this has the downside that it would be harder to support both 32 bit and 64 bit.

Supporting both 32 bit and 64 bit should be a matter of having a fb32 and a fb64 and adding both to the search path.

The example application will add the fb folder to the JNA search path itself when the system property jna.library.path hasn’t been specified explicitly:

private static void tryConfigureJNA() {
    String jnaPath = System.getProperty("jna.library.path");
    if (jnaPath == null || jnaPath.isEmpty()) {
        Path path = Paths.get("fb").toAbsolutePath();
        System.out.println("Attempting to set jna.library.path to: " + path);
        System.setProperty("jna.library.path", path.toString());
    }
}

To actually use Firebird Embedded is then just a matter of specifying the right connection URL:

"jdbc:firebirdsql:embedded:" + getDatabasePath()

Be aware that with the default configuration, fbclient.dll will try the embedded engine, but if that doesn’t work (eg engine12.dll cannot be loaded), it will then try the localhost server. This behaviour can be changed by adding a firebird.conf with setting Providers = Engine12 (which will disable the Remote and Loopback providers).

Jaybird 3.0.2 released

Sat, 19 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.2.

The following has been changed or fixed in Jaybird 3.0.2:

Fixed: Specifying an unknown Java character set in connection property charSet or localEncoding was handled as if no connection character set had been specified, now we throw an exception that the character set is unknown. (JDBC-498)
Changed: Specifying a connection character set is no longer required, and will now default to NONE again, if system property org.firebirdsql.jdbc.defaultConnectionEncoding is not specified. (JDBC-502)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9. Basic Java 9 compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Jaybird 3.0.1 released

Mon, 5 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.1.

The following has been changed or fixed in Jaybird 3.0.1:

Fixed: FBTraceManager.loadConfigurationFromFile strips line breaks (JDBC-493)
Fixed: FBDatabaseMetaData.getTables does not list tables where rdb$relation_type is null (JDBC-494)
Improvement: Character sets are now initialized lazily (JDBC-495)
Fixed: Memory leak caused by retaining blob handles until connection close (JDBC-497)

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9. Basic Java 9 compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

Documentation crowd-funding

The Firebird Project is currently holding a crowd-funding for the Firebird Developer Guide. Your donation is much appreciated!

See https://www.firebirdsql.org/en/doc-funding-2017/ for details.

Running Jaybird tests on docker

Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Vlad Mihalcea recently posted the blog How to run integration tests at warp speed using Docker and tmpfs, and I thought it would be interesting to see what needed to be done to run the Jaybird tests against a Firebird instance on docker.

I am writing this post as documentation for myself, but I hope it might be useful for others as well. Note that I don’t have a lot of experience with docker, so do not assume that things in this blog are docker best practices.

As a baseline, a normal test run from IntelliJ on my local machine takes about 10 - 11 minutes for Jaybird master (Jaybird 3.1).

Initial setup

For this experiment, I used the jacobalberty/firebird image.

The Jaybird tests include tests for events, and the documentation of the image suggests that to use events, you need to add --net=host to the docker run command, or RemoteAuxPort must be set and mapped. I use Docker for Windows, and unfortunately --net=host is not supported on Windows.

I started the image with:

docker run `
 --name firebird257 `
 -p 3050:3050 `
 -p 13050:13050 `
 --tmpfs /databases:rw `
 -e ISC_PASSWORD=masterkey `
 -e TZ=Europe/Amsterdam `
 -d `
 jacobalberty/firebird:2.5.7-ss

I’m using powershell, which uses ` as the line continuation character, for Windows cmd use ^, for Linux (bash) use \.

Note the use of --tmpfs /databases:rw to ensure the databases folder is using tmpfs, which is in-memory.

To get events to work I edited the /var/firebird/etc/firebird.conf (which, btw, is not a best practice!) to set RemoteAuxPort=13050, and stopped and started the image with docker stop firebird257 and docker start firebird257. A better solution would be to overlay the config file, but my docker-fu is lacking in this area for the moment.

As I’m binding port 3050 directly in this example, I need to make sure that no other instance of Firebird is running on that port locally.

First attempt

As my configuration above binds the image to 127.0.0.1:3050, I had assumed I could just run all tests from my IDE and be done with it, unfortunately this failed with:

SEVERE: Exception creating database
java.sql.SQLException: unavailable database [SQLState:08001, ISC error code:335544375]
	at org.firebirdsql.gds.ng.FbExceptionBuilder$Type$1.createSQLException(FbExceptionBuilder.java:498)
	at org.firebirdsql.gds.ng.FbExceptionBuilder.toFlatSQLException(FbExceptionBuilder.java:299)
	...

Oops. When Jaybird is run against a database on 127.0.0.1 or localhost, the test harness will try to put the database in the current working directory by transforming the relative path to an absolute path. And this obviously fails when you try to pass that absolute Windows path to a Linux image.

Fortunately, all 127.x.x.x addresses point to the local loopback, so running the tests against 127.0.0.2 should work just fine.

Second attempt

Adding -Dtest.db.host=127.0.0.2 to the run configuration of the tests should do the trick.

And it seems to work, although a number of tests fail. These failures can be explained though, as these tests expect the database or backup file to exist on the local filesystem, which now is not the case (just like when testing against a real remote database server). We’ll ignore these failures for now.

Unfortunately, the runtime of the test is 9+ minutes, and that is not significantly different from the original results. Inspection of the image using docker exec -i -t firebird257 /bin/bash and checking the /databases folder shows that the databases aren’t created in the /databases folder. It turns out they are being created in /tmp instead. This is probably caused by Jaybird using /fbtest.fdb as the database name instead of just fbtest.fdb, or maybe that is a result of the configuration in the image, I’m not sure. Explicitly specifying the /databases path should do the trick.

Third attempt

This time we also add -Dtest.db.dir=/databases to the run configuration.

And finally, we hit pay dirt: a run time of 3 minutes and 30 seconds. A reduction of about 7 minutes.

Up to now I have run the tests from my IDE, to run the ant build this way:

build -Dtest.db.host=127.0.0.2 -Dtest.db.dir=/databases

The performance improvement from running the tests from ant seems to be the same in absolute terms (from 12 minutes to 6-7 minutes without the build itself).

Conclusion

The results are certainly interesting. I will now need to find a cleaner way to change the configuration, and also run the tests against Firebird 3 (which requires additional configuration changes to work with Jaybird). To be continued.

Jaybird 3.0.0 released

Sun, 7 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 3.0.0.

Jaybird 3.0 is a big change from Jaybird 2.2 and earlier. The entire low-level implementation has been rewritten to be able to support protocol improvements in newer Firebird versions. We have also made changes with a stricter interpretation of the JDBC requirements, and removed some parts that were either obsolete or not functioning correctly.

Most notable changes in Jaybird 3:

Support for wire protocol versions 11, 12, and 13 (without support for encryption and compression); protocol version 13 contributed by Hajime Nakagami
Support for the Firebird 3 SRP (Secure Remote Password) authentication mechanism (contributed by Hajime Nakagami)
Support for streaming backup and restore (contributed by Ivan Arabadzhiev)
Improved Firebird 3 support
Improved and stricter JDBC support (including improved java.time support, and more optional methods implemented)
Initial JDBC 4.3 (Java 9) support (without real module support)
New implementation of the native/embedded Type 2 driver using JNA (a jaybird .dll/.so is no longer needed)
Improved character set handling
Removal of (buggy) connection pool implementation
Removal/replacement of (internal) GDS API

And a large number of smaller bug fixes, improvements, and changes.

We recommend that you do not consider Jaybird 3.0 a drop-in replacement for Jaybird 2.2, and study the release notes carefully.

Test your application with Jaybird 3.0 before using it in production.

Jaybird 3.0 supports Firebird 2.0 and higher, on Java 7, 8 and 9. Basic Java 9 compatibility is provided through the Java 8 version of the driver.

See also:

FBDTP Version 1.0.2.201106021154

Thu, 2 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Bugfix version

Fixes:

Loading of multi-action triggers
Column loading for tables containing blobs
Loading of constraints
Loading of index columns
Order of indices in DDL generation
Linebreaks in DDL stored procedures and triggers
DDL generation for sequences
Leave delegation to plugin config, don’t hardcode

Gotcha’s:

Largely untested (only minor testing done under Eclipse 3.5.2 with DTP 1.7.2 and Eclipse 3.6.2 with DTP 1.8.2)

Download: firebird_DTP_1.0.2.201106021154.zip

FBDTP Version 1.0.1.200907101543

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0200

Bugfix and 'less-is-more' release

Changes:

Code cleanup
More delegation to standard DTP implementation
Sourcecode added to distribution

Fixes:

Now all stored procedures are shown
Numeric fields are shown correctly in 'Data > Edit' (tested in Eclipse 3.5 / DTP 1.7)
Stored procedures code should be correct (unverified)
Trigger code is loaded
Menu 'Sample contents' now works correctly

Gotcha’s:

(slightly) tested on Eclipse 3.5 / DTP 1.7, untested on Eclipse 3.4 / DTP 1.6
Some datatypes introduced in Firebird 2.1 might not work correctly
DDL for sequence/generators cannot be shown yet
Some formatting issues with 'Export DDL' (especially for triggers)
Due to changes it is possible that some exceptions occur (especially on the 'SQL Results' tab with previous queries); fix by removing all previous results or removing Firebird specific results

Download: firebird_DTP_1.0.1.200907101543.zip

FBDTP Version 1.0.0.200906062028

Sat, 6 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200

First step integrating Roman Rokytskyy work.

Changes:

Used other (generic) UI for connection
The full jdbc-URL must be used
Connection now uses two 'virtual' schemas, SYSTEM and USER, to separate system metadata (RDB$.. and MON$.. tables/views) from the usermetadata
Sequences (generators) are now visible
Selectable stored procedures are now grouped under stored procedures
Constraints are now shown

Gotcha’s:

Untested
Only five stored procedures are shown
Numeric fields are not shown correctly in the 'edit'-view (context-menu on a table or view)
Stored procedure code is not correct (body usually is correct, but signature is wrong)
DDL for sequence/generators cannot be shown yet
Trigger code is not loaded
Dependencies are not shown
Some datatypes introduced in Firebird 2.1 might not work correctly
The option 'Sample contents' (context menu on a table or view) does not work

Download: firebird_DTP_1.0.0.200906062028.zip

FBDTP Version 1.0.0.200905311358

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 +0200

First version based on Brian Fitzpatrick’s work.

Gotcha’s:

Database version is 2.1, but it should work with most - if not all - Firebird versions
The connectionprofile wizard has a browse button (copied from the SQLite or Derby implementation): this doesn’t work correctly forfirebird and will be removed in a next version (see also next bullet)
Manually enter the 'Database location' as the string that would normally follow after the jdbc:firebirdsql:-part of the connection URL
Only rudimentary support for Firebird is available right now, so don’t expect too much
Specifying optional properties has not been tested yet
Stored Procedures are split among 'Stored Procedures' and 'User-Defined Functions'
User-Defined Functions are not shown
Stored Procedure definitions are not shown correctly
Sequences (generators) are not shown
Dependencies / constraints are not displayed

Download: firebird_DTP_1.0.0.200905311358.zip