Dmitry Yemanov has published the Firebird roadmap. The time plan is as follows:
Time plan
2005:
- Release 2.0 RC and fork the 2.0 HEAD to create the release branch
- Port some changes from independent trees to HEAD
- Fork the Vulcan HEAD to create the 3.0 development branch
2006, 1st
quarter:
- Release Firebird 2.0 Final and Firebird Vulcan Final
2006, 2nd
quarter:
- Release Firebird 3.0 Beta
- Fork the 3.0 HEAD to create the 3.0+ development branch
2006, 3rd
quarter:
- Release Firebird 3.0 Final
2006, 4th
quarter:
- Release Firebird 3.0+ Beta
Features requested
Let's take a look at the features planned for 3.0 and later releases by their priority (low-priority features omitted):
High-priority features:
- Asynchronous statement cancellation / timeouts
- Monitoring via API and/or special tables
- Embedded users / SQL users management
- User permissions for metadata
- Temporary tables / transient datasets
- More built-in functions
- Schemas/namespaces
- Native long numeric data type
- SMP support in Super Server
- Compiled statements cache
- External data sources / database links / cross-database SQL
- Statement/transaction consistency
- Faster outer joins
- Reliable logical backup
- Point-in-time recovery
Medium-priority features:
- Detailed SQL tracing/profiling
- Detailed logging/audit
- DDL level and global triggers
- Pluggable authentication modules
- Security groups
- Database encryption
- Optimizer improvements
- More effective sorting
- Optimized network protocol
- More access paths
- Recursive queries
- Regular expressions in search conditions
- TEXT BLOB compatible with [VAR]CHAR
- Domains everywhere
- Longer metadata names
- Bi-directional indices
- Bulk load/import
- Referential integrity without indices
- Full-text search
- Clustering
Firebird 3.0
So what should get into Firebird 3.0 (planned for Q3/200):
- Monitoring
- Asynchronous statement cancellation
- Embedded users / SQL users management
- More built-in functions
- Temporary tables
- SQL functions
- Recursive queries
- Faster outer joins
- SMP support in SS
- Compiled statements cache
- External functions/procedures
Firebird 3.0+
The features that should come in the release following after Firebird 3.0:
- Detailed logging/audit
- SQL tracing/profilingUser permissions for metadata
- Pluggable authentication modules
- Security groups
- Long exact numeric implementation
- Domains everywhere
- Regular expressions
- TEXT BLOB compatible with [VAR]CHAR
- Reliable logical backup
- Optimizer improvements
- Statement consistency/atomicy, read committed compliance
- Optimized network protocol
- Bi-directional indices
- Referential integrity without indices
- Bulk load/import
Want more?
Take a look at the full Firebird Roadmap 2006.
Via Firebird Weekly News: Firebird roadmap available online.
