This Firebird 1.0 maintenance release finally made it out of the door today.
It is a testament to the robustness of Firebird 1.0 that no major problems
have been found that have required fixing. However, almost six months have
passed since the Fb 1.0.2 and several bug fixes and enhancements have
appeared. Rather than letting them molder indefinitely it is better to get
them out into the big wide world.

The main bug fix was for a problem that was inadvertently introduced in Fb
1.0.2. Gbak and gfix could longer use the service manager api to work on
remote servers.

One new feature was added - the removal of an artificial limit on maximum
indexes per table. This had been set at 64. IBPhoenix had a client who needed
more and subsequently carried out the work to remove this limit for them. The
readme documents the new limits. It also (hopefully) explains adequately that
having a multiple indexes (never mind 64 or 200 or more) is a huge
performance drag on applications that are primarily for data update. Just
because you can now define 1000 indexes for a table doesn't mean that you
should!

An MSVC based control panel applet is now part of the Firebird 1.0 source tree
and builds automatically with the rest of the code. It re-uses existing code
in the source tree to manage Firebird services. The reasons for including
this are quite simple. Firstly, as a server control applet it is a core tool
and as such should be buildable with the rest of the server. Secondly, by
re-using code we can consistently manage the behaviour of the server. This is
not so important for Firebird 1.0 (because of a de facto feature freeze) but
is likely to become important for Firebird 1.5 and beyond. Thirdly, it
produces 50% smaller code than Delphi coded cpl applets. Firebird has a great
tradition for lean and mean and there is every reason for this to be
continued, even in an age of 80Gb disc drives.

While preparing the installable binaries for Firebird 1.5 release candidates
it became clear that the Firebird 1.0 and 1.0.2 installers have a major
design flaw. When doing an uninstallation they don't check to see if they are
the current Firebird version. If Firebird 1.5 is installed into a system
where Fb 1.0.0 or 1.0.2 exists and then Fb 1.0.0 or 1.0.2 are subsequently
uninstalled they will remove the registry entries for Fb 1.5. Firebird 1.0.3
fixes this problem. If you are planning on installing Firebird 1.5
simultaneously on a system with Firebird 1.0 it is highly recommended that
you upgrade to Fb 1.0.3 for this reason alone.

Simultaneous and harmonious existence between Firebird 1 and 1.5 still hasn't
been achieved. The remaining problems will be dealt with in subsequent
maintenance releases of Fb 1.0 and release candidates of Firebird 1.5.


Paul
--
Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
Supporting users of Firebird and InterBase

And here is the download page :D
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&page=ibp_download#100