Dmitry Yemanov did a session about Firebirds future, he included several slides about the almost-beta Firebird 2.5, an Alpha build is currently available via Firebirds website.

What is pending and postponed for the 2.5 release?
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pending:
- incremental backup stability
- better large numeric support in mathematics
- trace/audit extensions
- undo log management improvements

postponed:
- external procedures (written in Java, C++ or Delphi etc)

Because the external procedures turned out to be more difficult than was first thought, it has be postponed to 3.0

A lot of testing has been done with the 2.5 Alpha builds:
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- three months of stress testing
- SAS test ware: progress and results
- RedSoft: regression and concurrency testing
- performance testing (tpc-r, tpc-c, user feedback is very promising)

According to SAS, this is the most stable Alpha release ever, they even called it the most stable Firebird version ever.

Firebird 2.5 also includes many architectural changes aimed at making Firebird more suited for multi-CPU and multi-core machines.

When getting closer to Firebird 3.0, more changes are coming to the final product, theres the architectural changes:
- finally: shared page cache and metadata cache
- authentication to the network listener level
- possibility of separate engine providers
- single install package, 2 different server modes
- flexible per database configuration
- compiled statements cache

New core features:
- external procedures, functions and triggers
- PSQL Stored Functions
- DSQL triggers
- PSQL packages
- more statistics and optimizer improvements
- SQL compliant window functions
- full large numerics support
- possibly: updated API (less restrictive)



New security features:
- optional per database user management
- more authentication methods
- mapping OS users/rgoups to database users/roles
- DDL permissions, service permissions
- aggregated roles (grant role to role)
- user groups
- database encryption and/or over-the-wire encryption

Research:
- clustering (shared disk)
- WAL and point-in-time-recovery
- table partitioning
- nbackup-based standby and replication
- psql debugging
- full-text search

Here's the roadmap for the next few quarters:


Once more: interesting stuff!

Once the sessions are over, people sit around and talk about Firebird and the applications they have been creating. It's interesting to hear what people have got to say and see how they solved the problems they we're experiencing.

I got at least 1 new idea to solve a specific problem I have to deal with...



After people have gone to town to visit a restaurant, they get back to the hotel. Then, they sit around with a beer or two and talk about Firebird, the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The problems being solved now are of a different level: "I ran out of beer, do you still have some left?" :-)

This conference has a theme per day:

Thursday - Administration
Friday - Developers
Saturday - Applications

There were lots of sessions to choose from Yesterday, for example:
"Transactions in your applications" by Dmitry Kouzmenko gave you tips and tricks on transaction management, including not only the requirement to have a transaction for all database access (even a SELECT), but also the different transaction types and possible problems. Given his company, he has quite a lot of experience with all sorts of transaction related problems. Lots of information in this session.


Both Lucas Franzen and I (Martijn Tonies) talked about Stored Procedures and Triggers, Lucas did the more novice part while I tried explaning some of Firebirds oddities and gotchas in the "Stored Procedures & Triggers In Depth" session. If you didn't know about Stored Procedure or only started using them, both sessions would have been useful to you.


Frank Ingermann talked about recursive tree structures, he uses those in his day-time job and explained those to the people attending his session. He also showed an example, everyone is supposed to be able to create a marble-cake now, it's recipe was used in his example :)


Pavel Cisar is an enthusiastic Python user and uses Firebird with that, he did 2 sessions on the topic, both an introduction and a more advanced session.


Other sessions included "Developing Firebird applications for pocketpc/smartphone clients", "Using Firebird Embedded with .NET", "Separating web development from database logic" and many more...

Firebird is being actively developed by a few full-time developers paid for by Firebird Foundation, one of them is Vlad Khorsun and so he knows about new features in Firebird cause he's the guy doing the actually programming.


Vlad during his presentation

Recently, Firebird 2.5 alpha was released and it once more brings quite a few new features. Vlad did a presentation about these new things in Firebird 2.5, so if you cannot find the time to read the Release Notes, this presentation would have been useful to you.

Getting up-to-date with the latest on Firebird is one of the advantages of going to the Conference.



Vlad gives a detailed explanation and some excellent examples of the new features.

We've taken the bus to the "city center" a few times now, but didn't have the time to wander around.

Bergamo has an "old city center" build on top and around the top of a hill with a city wall around it. You can see it used to the protected area: narrow streets, high(-ish) buildings in order to build as many houses and shops inside the city walls.

It was getting dark Yesterday evening and it started to rain and there was hail as well. Not exactly the ideal conditions for a city walk... If I can find the time tomorrow morning, I'll take more pictures.