New Features in Firebird 1.5

(1.5.3) Make Old Column Naming Convention available

Paul Reeves

Added OldColumnNaming parameter to firebird.conf to allow users to revert to pre-V1.5 column naming in Select expressions.

(1.5.3) Security diagnostics added

Alex Peshkoff

Attempts to send signals via a missing gds_relay may be an exploit attempt. They are now logged.

(1.5.3) Closed an Endemic Security Hole

Alex Peshkoff

Previously, a user could log into a server on a Unix/Linux host remotely, using a Linux UID and password accepted on that host. It was recognised as a security hole and fixed in Firebird 2 development. It is an endemic security bug in previous versions and InterBase. The security fix has been back-ported to Firebird 1.5.3: a UID received from the client side is now not trusted.

Firebird 1.5.2 Point Release Additions

The following group of minor enhancements was added to the Firebird v.1.5.2 point release.-

(1.5.2) Performance improvement for permissions checking

N. Samofatov, D. Urban

Resource lists to check permissions are now computed on the fly as needed. For complex schemas, this significantly reduces memory and CPU time consumption.

(1.5.2) POSIX build and packaging changes

Nickolay Samofatov

•Work around bugs in GCC 3.3.2 and 3.3.3

•Support GCC 3.4 build

•Limit exports of Firebird libraries using version script

•Link client library and UDF libraries with POSIX threads. This cures problems with single-threaded hosts like PHP linking with libfbclient.so from CS packages

10