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Firebird 2.0

On 2006-11-12, directly at the Opening Keynote of the International Firebird Conference in Prague (CZ), the Firebird Project released version 2.0.0 of Firebird. This is a major release with a lot of additions, enhancements and improvements.

• Tons of improvements and new features
• Finer-grained database shutdown
• Support for 64-bit platforms
• ODS 11.0
• Sequences (in addition to Generators)
• EXECUTE BLOCK statement
• Derived Tables
• ROWS syntax (SELECT ... ROWS 10 TO 100)
• Enhanced SUBSTRING() function
• Context Variables
• TIMESTAMP now works with milliseconds (also affects CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and NOW)
• Explicit Cursors in PSQL
• Defaults for Stored Procedure Arguments
• LEAVE syntax to leave a loop (called "break" in other languages)
• OLD context variables in triggers are now read-only
• 252-byte index length limit is gone
• Expression Indexes
• A completely reworked and significantly improved optimizer
• New string functions: LOWER(), TRIM (), BIT_LENGTH(), CHAR_LENGTH(), OCTET_LENGTH()
• New INTL Interface for international characters
• New UTF-8 character set, named UTF8, as a replacement for the faulty UNICODE_FSS
• New Character Sets and Collations
• New Security database security2.fdb, which can only be accessed via the Service Manager
• New incremental backup-tool NBAK
• New GBAK -r semantics
• And many more ...