Hi all,

The Firebird project is proud to announce the availability of Firebird
relational database engine version 1.0.0 - Release Candidate 1.

Currently the win32 and linux binaries are available, other platforms
are expected to join them in the near future.

This release was built from code which has been subjected to
extensive cleanup, bug-fixing and beta testing during the year
between the release of the code and this release. The On-Disk
Structure is still ODS 10. Certain enhancements requiring changes
to the ODS have been deferred to a future release.

Here is the short list of enhancements included in this release.
Complete list of all new features, enhancements and bugfixes is
included in each distribution package in doc subdirectory. Separate
package that contains these information is also available.

General enhancements:
- Enhanced dependency checking
- Large database file support
- Engine support for 64-bit file I/O
- Support for 16-kb pages
- Expressly define external file location(s)
- Win32 Forced Writes defaul=ON
- Limit raised on External Table handles (NT)
- External files now closed when external table is droped
- CPU_AFFINITY configuration parameter
- Connection now defaults to port 3050
- Connection to server listening on a specific port
- Added -NONAGLE switch for Linux ports
- Additions and changes to isc_info_database

Language enhancements:
- CURRENT_USER and CURRENT_ROLE
- DROP GENERATOR
- GROUP BY UDF
- RECREATE PROCEDURE and RECREATE TABLE
- SELECT [FIRST x][SKIP y]
- SUBSTRING built-in function
- New PLANONLY option for statements
- Allow FK indexes to be disabled
- Case insensitive Hungarian Collation set
- New comment marker for scripts

API Enhancements:
- Enhancements to isc_database_info

Last minute installation notes for Linux:

RPM packages were built and tested on SuSE 7.2. They should
also fit to other distributions, especially the Classic one, but you
may experience some problems with initd (superserver) or
inetd/xinetd (classic) integration. If you're concerned about this
issue, you should rather download the tar.gz package as it's more
interactive, and it's more suitable to sort out possible problems in
installation scripts. Anyway, we'd like to hear from you about all
installation problems.


We hope you'll enjoy the experience
The Firebird team


There is nothing wrong with InterBase
that Firebird can't fix for you
http://www.firebirdsql.org